Gertrude Stein's Surrealist Years 9780817320638, 9780817392994

Table of contents :
Contents
Acknowledgments
1. Contexts
2. Ruskin’s Ghost
3. On Style
4. The Drowned
5. The Pleasures of Solipsism
6. Beginnings, Middles, and Ends
Afterword
Notes
Works Cited
Index

Citation preview

Gertrude Stein’s Surrealist Years

Gertrude Stein’s Surrealist Years Ery Shin

T H E U N I V E R S I T Y O F A L A ­B A M A P R E S S Tuscaloosa

The University of Ala­bama Press Tuscaloosa, Ala­bama 35487-­0380 uapress.ua.edu Copyright © 2020 by the University of Ala­bama Press All rights reserved. Inquiries about reproducing material from this work should be addressed to the University of Ala­bama Press. Typeface: Scala, Baskerville and Caslon Cover image: Liz Hui, 1,000 Perfect Circles, 9" × 11", pen and ink, 2019; courtesy of the artist Cover design: David Nees Cataloging-­in-­Publication data is available from the Library of Congress. ISBN: 978-­0-­8173-­2063-­8 E-­ISBN: 978-­0-­8173-­9299-­4

For Injoo Hwang, Yongdo Shin, and Young Kwon Shin

Contents Acknowledgments     ix 1. Contexts     1 2. Ruskin’s Ghost     29 3. On Style     45 4. The Drowned     72 5. The Pleasures of Solipsism     103 6. Beginnings, Middles, and Ends     133 Afterword     160 Notes     169 Works Cited     203 Index     215

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would like to thank the anonymous reviewer at the journal Dada/­ Surrealism who gave me feedback that was tough yet so fair-­minded and generous that I wrote this monograph in response. For taking an interest in my work, the University of Ala­bama Press’s editor-­in-­chief, Daniel Water­man, is someone I couldn’t be more grateful for. This book likewise could not have been completed without Arizona State University’s Sharon J. Kirsch and Hunter College’s Amy Moorman Robbins, both of whom read through drafts and invited me to speak at a number of Stein conferences. Such gestures of kindness changed my career. And then to my immediate family—Injoo Hwang, Yongdo Shin, and Young Kwon Shin— this work is also yours.

Gertrude Stein’s Surrealist Years

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t isn’t easy to follow Gertrude Stein’s stylistic evolution over the­  decades. Too much material exists in too many scattered editions. There is no equivalent to Faber’s The Complete Poems and Plays of T. S. Eliot (2011) for her. Teeming with indeterminate articles, prepositions, coordinating conjunctions, pronouns, and split infinitives, Stein’s early repetitive mode1 has been interpreted as cinematic; perimathematical; battologeo; quasi-­ zen chanting to induce alternative psychedelic states; infantile babble; a way to empty words of meaning through sheer exhaustion; shitting; autoerotic; ­automatic; monologuing; antipatriarchal because strange-­looking; or a punk dyke cover-­up.2 Stein’s later styles are thought to encompass all these descriptions and more—word-­music, cubist, abstract, landscape, expressionist, futurist, antilyric, hermetic, autotelic, postmodern, anticapitalist, deconstructionist, or arbitrary enough to evoke the artifice lurking behind all language.3 Efforts to more comprehensively reconstruct the author’s stylistic ­progression—­or just win her more airtime in university and high school classrooms—continue. But Stein’s po­liti­cal legacy remains another matter. In the past decade and a half, the rhetorical excesses belonging to Stein’s hagiographic readings have been compounded by what can only be called an undiscriminating backlash against her “bad” WWII behavior. The pendulum keeps swinging to extremes, hinting at the critic’s ongoing dilemma of treading that fine line between overstating a writer’s moral triumphs (as manifested in the sympathies elicited by this-­that literary content) and taking him or her to task for personal failures offstage. Both poles miss the point of what art is: something neither necessarily begotten from an upstanding citizen nor drafted for the explicit purpose of moral instruction. It remains wearisome that some readers still expect the writer to impart feel-­good wisdoms, but to indulge in the level of moralizing regard­ ing Stein’s wartime activities that the New Yorker’s Emily Greenhouse does in “Gertrude Stein and Vichy: The Overlooked History” (2012) and “Why Won’t the Met tell the Whole Truth about Gertrude Stein?” (2012) reiterates the importance of criti­cal discretion. In private confidence Stein may have described herself as “a Jew, or-

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thodox background, and I never make any bones about it”4 to her young admirer Samuel Steward—a pen pal who became a close friend, and who transitioned from being a full-­time English academic to a tattoo artist-­ cum-­pornographic writer—but her relative pub­lic silence on the Holocaust and friendship with Nazi collaborator Bernard Faÿ continue to perturb a number of readers. For that reason, one suspects, the way in which Stein’s complicated Jewish sympathies inform the tenor and subject of her later works—better yet, the way these texts reveal a surrealist sensibility enmeshed in her war-­born anxieties (not least of which arose from a dread of anti-­Semitism)—hasn’t been canvassed at length. Fueled by scholarship in the vein of Barbara Will’s Unlikely Collaboration: Gertrude Stein, Bernard Faÿ, and the Vichy Dilemma (2011) and Janet Malcolm’s Two Lives: Gertrude and Alice (2007), the unease surrounding Stein’s po­liti­cal bent during the Second World War has escalated to the proportion that Stein faces recurring charges of Nazi collaborationism today. Such pronouncements, in turn, raise the question of whether she qualifies as a collaborationist and how far that term can be stretched in a world where death thrives in casual abundance. Greenhouse’s name was mentioned earlier because she encourages the pub­lic to pursue a well-­meaning, if misguided, retroactive justice. When the exhibition The Steins Collect opened at the Metropolitan Museum of Art in 2012, Greenhouse reports, a group petitioned to have what they believed to be Stein’s pro-­Vichy efforts highlighted in the display itself.5 Yet harboring some leftover fondness for Marshal Pétain as the aging “Victor of Verdun” (a sentiment shared by the French majority during the interwar period) and agreeing to translate him under pressure from Faÿ, a confidant upon whom, she was keenly aware, her property and personal safety depended, hardly turns Stein into a collaborationist worth prosecuting or even labeling as such. A skim through her WWII memoir Wars I Have Seen (1945) speaks volumes here. In it one can trace Stein’s growing disenchantment with Pétain, how frightened and resentful she is of German soldiers, her bewilderment at the anti-­Semitism around her, her hopes for Hitler’s demise, and her poignant awareness of her own vulnerability as a Jew in occupied territory despite her Ameri­can citizenship and celebrity perks. Add to these strands the predictable incompletion of Pétain’s translation project, and the overkill comes into sharper relief. Stein couldn’t even translate Georges Hugnet’s Enfances (1933), a poem less than thirty pages long, without bickering over authorial ownership, eventually falling out with Hugnet over his unwillingness to endorse her “translation” of his text. Her version had become so far removed from the origi­nal as to merit



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its own title: Before the Flowers of Friendship Faded Friendship Faded (1931).6 If Stein is deemed a collaborationist, then virtually anyone in France at the time could be as well. Coming full circle, one reiterates: few sources cover Stein’s ­surrealist gestures in detail, much less situate them against her WWII experiences. What allusions exist are fleeting, usually affirming Stein’s interest in writing from alternative psychedelic states (although she denied relying on psychic automatism) or in reinvigorating perceptual experience from the ground up. In “Gertrude Stein and the Modernist Canon” (1988), M ­ arianne DeKoven points out, “Although Stein rejects both the Freudian subconscious and the idea of automatic writing, and in that sense is anti-­surrealist, she does see her writing as proceeding from a state of trance or meditation, and therefore from depths of the mind which are capable of purer, more profound vision than the shallows of ‘normal’ consciousness.”7 Daniel ­Albright extends this thread in Untwisting the Serpent: Modernism in Music, Literature, and Other Arts (2000), not only reemphasizing Stein’s undergraduate training in automatic writing under William James’s care (an education that Albright, too, recognizes she “revolted against”8), but taking pains to mention that her cross-­sensory associations exude a surrealist aura, one belying her distaste for surrealism per se: “Surrealism never did interest me,” she reported, and she remembered that when she and Dalí talked, “neither of us listened very much to one another.” If Dalí was a bore, Tzara seemed “like a pleasant and not very exciting cousin.” But even in her expressions of distaste for surrealists and surrealism and automatic writing, it is possible to notice certain surrealist habits of thought. The notion that poetry is addressed to the eye and painting to the ear is exactly the sort of sensory switching that the sur­ realists cultivated. If her jingles are eye jingles, if her repetitions are to be enjoyed as recurrences in a visual schema on the page, if her anti-­linear, sometimes asyntactic sentences force the eye to keep doubling back on words already read but not yet construed—then Stein might say, in the words of the discarded title for the calligrams, Me, I’m a painter too. Stein is a surrealist not in the Breton or Dalí tradition, but in the Apollinaire tradition—except that some of Stein’s experiments in shaped verbal textures predated Apollinaire’s.9

Finally, those such as Will (in an earlier work—Gertrude Stein, Modernism, and the Problem of “Genius” [2000]) and William Wasserstrom (“The Sur­ symamericubealism of Gertrude Stein” [1975]) claim Stein under the sur-

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realist umbrella insofar as she participated in modernism’s broader m ­ ania for “estranging” the world in Viktor Shklovsky’s sense.10 If, according to Shklovsky, repeated exposure to objects dulls their sensuous immediacy for us, Stein’s near-­automatic writing (near in semblance, not intent) disrupts such perceptual automatization. In the eyes of Will and Wasserstrom, surrealism, a style of thinking Stein practiced despite her protests, lies at the heart of modernism, sharing many of modernism’s heroic conceptual ambitions. It is impossible to speak of surrealism without speaking of war, the most concretely realized macrocosm for nihilistic bodily excesses prohibited (and largely unimaginable) in broad daylight. War in Stein’s era posed one of the few contexts where André Breton’s dictum of a “man cut in two by the window”11 could be not a vision, but an everyday terror. War recontextualizes the arena of civilian order. It is meaningful that Stein confesses in Wars I Have Seen, “The times are so peculiar now, so mediaeval so unreasonable that for the first time in a hundred years truth is really stranger than fiction. Any truth.”12 In war, fact bleeds into fiction (and vice versa), becoming redundant terms. As the delayed ideological child of Jacques ­Vaché, Breton’s earliest hero of his own generation, part of surrealism’s appeal rests in its readiness to help us come to terms with war’s initial, and thereafter intermittent, incredibility. Or, rather, it reminds us that polite reality is precisely that: polite, a carefully maintained ward against those violently seething energies Vaché so adored. One of twentieth-­century France’s first unofficial performance artists, Vaché was an art student given over to role-­ playing and a love of the outrageously nonsensical. He abhorred canonical authors and social niceties. Before he died at the age of twenty-­four, by either an accidental or a deliberate opium overdose, he taught Breton that among life’s most thrilling pleasures is the pub­lic spectacle of irrationality. Breton was to repeatedly return to the anecdote about his friend trying to fire into the audience of Apollinaire’s play Les mamelles de Tirésias on June 24, 1917. For what is more conspicuously irrational than such acts of terrorism? War simply enlarges the scale of the game. Everything is surrealism, and so nothing need be named thus. The movement halts before its final goal: to render itself gratuitous—not even realism, but reality itself.13 Originally motivated by Stein’s own questions regarding WWII, this book has eventually become a rumination on how war’s oppositional logic informs Stein’s surrealist imagination, that is, how surrealism enriches our understanding of Stein’s last decade through its poetics of oppositions. In the 1930s and 1940s, especially for a Jewish Ameri­can expatriate resid-



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ing in France, surrealism rendered the era’s radically dystopian energies legible but also imbued with a sense of their own erasure. The self negating the self; wandering against a backdrop of increasingly limited free­doms; circumventing time altogether; a civilization of lonely loners—to be clear, such paradoxical strands aren’t framed by Breton’s revolutionism. Rather than drawing out life’s possibilities, they epitomize Stein’s ur­gent, if ambivalent, return to the his­tori­cal. From The Autobiography of Alice B. Toklas (1933) onward, Stein outwardly repudiates narrative writing even as she translates her experiences of storytelling’s world-­shaping force—on celebrity, on the Aryan ideal—in the language of the marvelous. Put another way, and Stein’s fondness for repetitive variations courts restatements of this sort, if The Autobiography of Alice B. Toklas spurred Stein’s thoughts on memorialization, storytelling assumes a more urgent role in Stein’s later works, penned in the world of Hitler’s absolutist fables. Within such a po­ liti­cal atmosphere, Stein’s focus on life writing complicated her ongo­ing discomfort with Aristotelian time and literary norms. As the dream­like phenomenon of war deepened around her, Stein began engaging more strenuously with history rather than dwelling on the ahistorical—­what Stein called the “continuous present,” then the “entity” or “human mind” mentality. Mixed sentiments regarding the in­di­vidual set adrift from a his­ tori­cally situated community gradually diluted her solipsistic motifs (withdrawn protagonists professing to dyschronometria). War, for Stein as for countless others, normalized the extraordinary. Within its confines, Stein began to revalue the presence of others and temporal units. Establishing the premise for this evolution, this chapter traces Stein’s personal connections with in­di­vidual surrealists as well as the movement’s broader ideas, while the next homes in on how she shared surrealism’s hyperboles regarding the artist’s ability to transcribe his or her thoughts. More specifically, the sec­ond chapter, “Ruskin’s Ghost,” examines how John Ruskin’s advice to see the world as though for the first time trickles down to us through Cézanne, the Goncourt brothers, Picasso, the surrealists, and Stein—in her works such as Tender Buttons (1914), “Pictures” (1935), and Picasso (1938). In her haste to leave behind yesterday’s art forms, she sought inspiration from photography, film recording, and collage without grasping their roots in the imagination. While critics such as Christopher J. Knight in The Patient Particulars: Ameri­can Modernism and the Technique of Originality (1995) have already noted that Stein’s pursuit of Ruskin’s ideal “was always a quixotic one,”14 chapter 2 situates her quest in the surrealist context. Even as Knight covers Tender Buttons and Picasso, he departs

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from Stein’s early typological works and William James’s influence as opposed to “Pictures,” impressionist thought (an allusion to Monet notwithstanding), and the surrealists as this book does.15 Chapter 3 builds upon such tensions between what Stein perceived to be artificial as opposed to excitingly authentic art. After enunciating those differences between Stein’s prose and that belonging to her surrealist contemporaries, the chapter pores over Stein’s stylistic ideal: the aforementioned “human mind” or “entity” writing. This mode entails recording sensory impressions and stray thoughts from a place of absolute emotional detachment. Though impossible to realize in practice, this mind-­set valiantly attempts to minimize the writer’s sense of time, personal history, kinship, and feelings in general. (Never mind that these factors allow the writer to want to write in the first place.) Ultimately, discussing Stein’s aesthetic standards sharpens our appreciation of where, and how, her later works obscure them. Shifting from Stein’s theories to her life, chapter 4 surveys the recent controversy surrounding her po­liti­cal conservatism. Without clarifying that she very much identified as a Jew (if in her own secular way), and that she never harbored Nazi sympathies, this book would fall apart. “The Drowned” chapter foregrounds the argument that Stein can be seen as a surrealist writer, because it delineates the biographical circumstances that would have rendered the movement appealing to her. The last two chapters, then, settle around her surrealist gestures themselves. With sustained reference to Stein’s last memoirs—Paris France (1940), Wars I Have Seen—chapters 5 and 6 focus on different aspects of Stein’s fabulously war-­inflected solips­ ism. In chapter 5, Stein’s heroine Ida, a character somewhere between a Husserlian phenomenologist and Shakespearean misanthrope, leads readers along an exercise in futility for much of the 1941 eponymous novel. Itinerant, potentially attracted to both sexes,16 and schizophrenic, Ida both embodies the spirit behind Stein’s most hermetic manner of writing and attempts to act out its purest expression: utter aloneness. She personifies the solipsistic energies that Stein aligns with the child fig­ure, dreaming of becoming a world unto herself—a world, not incidentally, already claimed by children in that its war-­torn state results from infantile aggression. Warfare, Stein observes, is conducted by overgrown boys who don’t know any better. Chapter 6 likewise revolves around a childlike solipsist, but the pleasures of solipsism sour even more for Mrs. Reynolds’s Angel Harper (a proxy for Adolf Hitler). Within the nightmarishly marvelous world of war he himself spawns, he gradually succumbs to Father Time, to everyone’s relief. The afterword gathers all of these strands back under surrealism’s dream



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motif. It helped Stein come to terms with her life in occupied France. Beyond providing a convenient analogy for war, the dream illuminates the movement’s intimately intertwined solipsistic and sadistic undercurrents that clear the ground for military carnage in the first place—however unconsciously, and not a little ironically, considering surrealism’s backlash against the First World War. As a final addendum, the conclusion visits Stein’s friendship with the surrealist René Crevel. His death created another moment for pause—this time, regarding those oppositions underlying all life itself.

i Although Stein never identified as a surrealist proper, being averse to Breton’s publicity stunts and macho bravura (which isn’t to say she herself was immune to the kind of publicity mongering she accused the surrealists of ), her expatriate existence brought her in touch with a number of surrealist practitioners and luminaries. Among them were Breton’s personal hero Guillaume Apollinaire, Salvador Dalí, Francis Picabia, Man Ray, Le Corbusier (who built a house for Stein’s eldest brother, Michael, in the Parisian suburbs), Pavel Tchelitchew, Bravig Imbs, Francis Rose, Hugnet, Pierre de Massot (who penned the preface for Stein’s Dix Portraits [1930], a collection released in France by Hugnet’s family-­funded press Les Editions de la Montagne),17 Crevel, and, although more peripherally involved in the movement, Tristan Tzara, Marcel Duchamp, and Jean Cocteau. Yes, she described Breton as a buffoon who prized “anything to which he can sign his name,”18 yet still monitored his movements and welcomed him into her home on a regular basis. (Breton, on his end, returned Stein’s latent hostilities by never naming her as a founding influence. He acknowledged Picasso, Picabia [when they weren’t quarreling], Duchamp, Giorgio de Chirico, Joan Miró, Max Ernst, and Man Ray as kings of the visual realm. Comte de Lautréamont, Arthur Rimbaud, Germain Nouveau, Alfred Jarry, Sigmund Freud, Raymond Roussel, the Marquis de Sade, and Apollinaire reign, in turn, as kings of the verbal.19 Nowhere does Stein’s name enter— or any woman’s, really.) Or perhaps it would be more accurate to say that Stein was on friendly terms with a number of surrealists as individuals. For these younger artists and writers, Stein’s residence was a glamorously cozy beacon in the Parisian scene. For Stein, being among the surrealists had the unspoken benefit of keeping her abreast of the latest avant-­ garde trends. Despite her harsh words reserved for Breton in The Autobiography of Alice B. Toklas, they became friendly enough by the late 1930s for Stein to

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throw garden parties at Bilignin for him. Steward, then a budding English academic visiting Stein during the summer of 1937, recalls his host uttering the following right before Breton, Yves Tanguy, Roberto Matta, and their cohorts arrived one afternoon for punch and nibbles: Well, the first thing is Andre Breton, he’s about as big as I am, and he’s the leader and everybody has to kowtow to him, and certainly you must because he founded surrealism, but don’t genuflect. As for me, I won’t kowtow, we meet as equals. And then there’s Yves Tanguy, he’s all tangled up but he’s a nice person. And Matta who comes from Chile and really can paint and he’s the handsomest of the lot. Then there will be Madame Breton or at least I guess that’s what she is and they have a little girl – well, they’ll all be coming and who knows who else – and it’ll be quite a crowd and the Rops will be here too. Oh my god, I hate parties like this I really do, and people will be taking pictures and spilling punch all over everything the drunker they get.20

It’s easy to imagine that something from the conversations shared during such occasions must have lingered with Stein. In drawing inspiration from the movement’s ideas without necessarily publicizing the case, Stein joins the ranks of women such as Hélène Smith, Aloïse Corbaz, Anna Zemánková, and Unica Zürn, who practiced surrealism without the Parisian in-­crowd’s knowledge or recognition.21 More broadly yet, Stein’s surrealist gestures recall all the others performed by countless women circulating in Breton’s midst: Meret Oppenheim, Frida Kahlo, Dorothea Tanning, Leonora Carrington, Claude Cahun, Dora Maar, Emilia Medková, Ithell Colquhoun, Helen Lundeberg, Lee Miller, Kay Sage, Eileen Agar, Valentine Penrose, Remedios Varo, Leonor Fini, Rachel Baes, Edith Rimmington, Toyen, Marion Adnams, Elisa Breton, Nusch Éluard, Valentine Hugo, Grace Pailthorpe, Sonia Mossé, Maria Martins, Denise Bellon, Yolande Oliviero, and Princess Fahrelnissa Zeid. Most of these women, and those who followed (e.g., Emmy Bridgwater, Penny Slinger, Jane Graverol, Mimi Parent, Francesca Woodman, Eva Švankmajerová, Lola Alvarez Bravo, Josette Exandier, Cindy Sherman), were overshadowed by their male counterparts, who tended to treat women more as muses than professional equals.22 So besides being the rare writer among female surrealists, Stein cuts an impressive fig­ure for the esteem she commanded from men in a man’s world. One is reminded of how charming, charismatic, and self-­assured she must have been at her prime: older than most



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surrealists by roughly two decades, financially secure, with an intimidating educational background. This being said, the differences between Stein and Breton’s crowd were real. Beyond personality and generational frictions, Stein’s distaste for surrealism stemmed from some misunderstandings regarding the movement itself. Breton’s perceived sanctimoniousness didn’t help. Neither did the hypermasculine cult of psychic automatism his circle practiced in its earliest days. Yet Stein also of­ten unfairly identified surrealism with a certain subset of painting. Surrealism became, in her hands, an exclusively visual phenomenon gaining momentum in the 1920s. In The Autobiography of Alice B. Toklas, surrealism is reduced to an amateurish skirting around a mystically inflected abstract expressionist ideal: The Surréalistes are the vulgarization of Picabia as Delaunay and his followers and the futurists were the vulgarization of Picasso. Picabia had conceived and is struggling with the problem that a line should have the vibration of a musical sound and that this vibration should be the result of conceiving the human form and the human face in so tenuous a fashion that it would induce such vibration in the line forming it. It is his way of achieving the disembodied. It was this idea that conceived mathematically influenced Marcel Duchamp and produced his The Nude Descending the Staircase. All his life Picabia has struggled to dominate and achieve this conception. Gertrude Stein thinks that perhaps he is now approaching the solution of his problem. The surréalistes taking the manner for the matter as is the way of the vulgarizers, accept the line as having become vibrant and as therefore able in itself to inspire them to higher flights. He who is going to be the creator of the vibrant line knows that it is not yet created and if it were it would not exist by itself, it would be dependent upon the emotion of the object which compels the vibration. So much for the creator and his followers.23

Commending the vibrant—an apt adjective for her own writing style, which constantly slides off the syntactical grid—Stein implies that surrealism, in­ clud­ing its literary branch, feels too polished, too vapid. And in two paragraphs, she severs Picabia and Duchamp from both surrealism and futurism, notwithstanding their reciprocal influence, valorizing a conflated version of impressionism and abstract expressionism in the process. These arbitrary divisions become all the more disconcerting considering how pro-

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foundly Picabia and Duchamp shared futurism’s investment in overlaying stop-­motion stills, exemplified in Giacomo Balla’s Dynamism of a Dog on a Leash (1912). Stein retreated from the Italians, who’re deemed underwhelming, even “very dull.”24 The young Frenchmen bustling around Apollinaire receive similarly unsympathetic treatment in Toklas’s pseudo-­ memoir: “I can so well remember the first time Gertrude Stein took me to see Guillaume Apollinaire. It was a tiny bachelor’s apartment on the rue des Martyrs. The room was crowded with a great many small young gentlemen. Who, I asked Fernande, are all these little men. They are poets, answered Fernande. I was overcome. I had never seen poets before, one poet yes but not poets.”25 Stein’s affected deference for “these little men,” the soon-­to-­be surrealists, makes plain her disdain for most of Paris’s intelligentsia at the time, Marinetti and Pound included. Apollinaire remains another matter, being one of the few whose memory never soured for Stein. Stein’s fondness for Apollinaire is apparent from his sizable presence in The Autobiography of Alice. B Toklas. Sixteen years Breton’s senior, and the man who allegedly coined the term “surrealism,”26 Guillaume epitomized its spirit for Breton and Stein alike. “Guillaume Apollinaire,” Stein writes, “on the contrary was very wonderful.”27 He is “very attractive,” “very interesting,” a regular Caesar in looks (no small compliment from a writer who took pride in being compared to the Roman emperors of old), with “finely cut florid features, dark hair and a beautiful complexion.”28 He is deemed “heroic” in his military volunteering.29 Praise for Apollinaire’s brilliance and lovability continues with: “[Guillaume was] extraordinarily brilliant and no matter what subject was started, if he knew anything about it or not, he quickly saw the whole meaning of the thing and elaborated it by his wit and fancy carrying it further than anybody knowing anything about it could have done, and oddly enough generally correctly.”30 Or the equally admiring: “Nobody but Guillaume [. . .] could make fun of his hosts, make fun of their guests, make fun of their food and spur them to always greater and greater effort.”31 Apollinaire brought people together, teaching the Delauneys “how to cook and how to live.”32 Even during the First World War, he remained a comfort to Stein, writing her amusing letters on “falling off of horses in the endeavour to become an artillery-­man.”33 Apollinaire was a man ahead of his time, a debonair tastemaker. Writing as Toklas, Stein recounts seeing him mingling with an aristocratic crowd at a showing of The Rite of Spring (1913): “He was dressed in evening clothes and he was industriously kissing vari­ous important looking ladies’ hands. He was the first one of his crowd to come out into the great world wearing



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evening clothes and kissing hands. We were very amused and very pleased to see him do it. It was the first time we had seen him doing it. After the war they all did these things but he was the only one to commence before the war.”34 What could easily grate on her nerves only endeared him to her. For this was Apollinaire’s charm. He exulted in the art of living by imbuing life with a magical element. His daily habits distinguished him as a surrealist study in opposites. With a “brother whom one heard about but never saw,”35 Apollinaire rendered his life into a punctuational flourish by working in a bank by day, in the streets as a poet-­philosopher by night. The surrealist in Apollinaire comes to the fore when he entreats Toklas to “sing some of the native songs of the red Indians”36 at Henri Rousseau’s dinner banquet. His surrealist side could be glimpsed when Paris gossiped about his impending duel with an unnamed writer. The pair sat for hours at different cafés (a ritual Stein reports as having lasted “for days, perhaps weeks and months”37), warming up to the event by ordering more drinks from the menu, chitchatting with their go-­betweens. The surrealist in-­joke becomes that the actual fight never took place. The situation’s zaniness arises from Apollinaire’s savoring the duel’s preparatory rituals, the spectacle of it all. On a more melancholy note, he even died in a surreal manner two nights before WWI’s armistice. Crowds were chanting, “Down with Guillaume,”38 referring to the German Kaiser Wilhelm II. To Apollinaire’s disoriented ears, however, these taunts were for him. From Apollinaire, Stein briskly recapitulates her acquaintance with other surrealists in The Autobiography of Alice B. Toklas. She encountered Cocteau through Picasso. Their association deepened years later when Stein learned that Cocteau admired her poem “The Portrait of Mabel Dodge” (1912), becoming “the first french writer to speak of her work.”39 She continued to keep up with his doings through personal correspondence, and through Picasso, with whom Cocteau occasionally collaborated. The upscale Jewetts, “an Ameri­can couple who owned a tenth century chateau near Perpignan,”40 brought the Jewish Ameri­can Man Ray into Stein’s orbit. He eventually snapped a series of her portraits, most notably in her studio. Tchelitchew caught Stein’s eye for showcasing the “most mature and the most interesting”41 work of Paris’s budding neoromantics, despite what she considered to be painting’s regression to “a minor art” then.42 They struck up a genial acquaintance, Tchelitchew’s Russian-­bred anti-­Semitism notwithstanding.43 Bravig Imbs earned a similarly approving, if still condescending, mention in the autobiography: “Among the other young men who came to the house at the time when they came in such numbers was Bravig Imbs. We liked Bravig, even though as Gertrude Stein said, his aim

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was to please.” Around the time that Stein befriends Sylvia Beach after the armistice, Tzara “first appears in Paris.”45 Assuming Toklas’s voice, Stein goes on to say, “Adrienne Monnier was much excited by his advent. ­Picabia had found him in Switzerland during the war and they had together created dadaism, and out of dadaism, with a great deal of struggle and quarreling came surréalism. Tzara came to the house, I imagine Picabia brought him but I am not quite certain. I have always found it very difficult to understand the stories of his violence and his wickedness, at least I found it difficult then because Tzara when he came to the house sat beside me at the tea-­table and talked to me like a pleasant and not very exciting cousin.”46 Unlike Picabia, who grew on Stein over time, Tzara endured the worst sentence a performance artist can earn: dullness. Dadaism followed the same course in Stein’s estimation as futurism and surrealism. To be fair, Picabia resembled a bloated Don Juan in Stein’s initial impression of him. “He annoyed [Stein] with his incessantness and what she called the vulgarity of his delayed adolescence,” Toklas’s character notes. “But oddly enough in this last year they have gotten to be very fond of each other. She is very much interested in his drawing and in his painting. It began with his show just a year ago. She is now convinced that although he has in a sense not a painter’s gift he has an idea that has been and will be of immense value to all time. She calls him the Leonardo da Vinci of the movement. And it is true, he understands and invents everything.”47 Picabia lacked Picasso’s technical virtuosity yet had a knack for churning out intriguing conceptual pieces—all the more so for tackling the worry “that after all the human being essentially is not paintable.”48 United by such aesthetic problems, the two grew close enough for Picabia to gift Stein with a dog named Byron. Stein wrote the preface for Picabia’s 1932 exhibition catalogue. She hung his Pa (1932) and Gertrude Stein (1933) on her walls. They even planned to arrange a stage production of Stein’s Listen to Me (1936) together. With Stein drafting the script and Picabia decorating the stage, the drama would address, as she puts it, “how the world is covered all over with people and so nobody can get lost any more and the dogs do not bark at the moon any more because there are so many lights everywhere that they do not notice the moon any more.”49 A nostalgia for a world less demystified by a technological eclipse can be glimpsed here, itself a common complaint among twentieth-­century moderns. Besides Picabia, Stein was drawn to Duchamp, Crevel, Francis Rose, and Hugnet. Her falling-­out with the last overshadowed their friendship. Stein met Hugnet through Virgil Thomson, but their mutual “devotion”50 soured after Stein, again, strayed from her promise to translate his L’En­ 44



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fances into English. The translation turned into a poem about Hugnet’s poem. What follows is a stark sum-­up: “This at first pleased Georges Hugnet too much and then did not please him at all.”51 Aware of New York’s groundbreaking 1913 Armory Show, where Duchamp’s Nude Descending a Staircase premiered on the Ameri­can stage, Stein described Duchamp as a “young norman crusader” at a group dinner with the Picabias.52 Du­ champ seemed to return Stein’s appreciation by styling his female alter ego, “Rrose Sélavy,” after both her and Toklas. Fusing Stein’s mantra “Rose is a rose is a rose is a rose” with Toklas’s fashion sensibilities and mien, Rrose comes across as an explicitly Jewish character. Not only does her surname recall the Jewish “Levy,” but Duchamp’s repeated admissions of being interested in Jewishness are suggestive indeed. He once told the French art critic Pierre Cabanne about his drag character: “I wanted to change my identity, and the first idea that came to me was to take a Jewish name. I was Catholic and it was a change to go from one religion to another. I didn’t find a Jewish name that I especially liked or that tempted me, and suddenly I had an idea: why not change sex? It was much simpler. So the name of Rrose Sélavy came from that.”53 Another of Duchamp’s interviewers, the New Yorker’s art critic Calvin Tomkins, recollects Duchamp describing his drag persona’s origins thus: “It was not to change my identity, but to have two identities. But then the idea jumped at me, why not a female name? Much better than to change religion would be to change sex. [. . .] Rose was the corniest name for a girl at that time, in French, anyway. And Sélavy was a pun on c’est la vie.”54 It appears he changed both his sex and religion when one looks at Man Ray’s photograph Marcel Duchamp as Rrose Sélavy (1923). The Frenchman’s dark, drooping eyebrows and hat uncannily bring Toklas’s face to mind. As for the English painter Rose, aside from his auspicious surname, his paintings earned him Stein’s patronage from the 1930s onward. Although never fully convinced of his talent (an estimation that history has borne out), she consistently hosted and consoled him through­out his rocky romantic life. In Dear Sammy, Steward remembers how he encountered Rose with his then romantic interest Cecil Beaton at Stein’s Bilignin residence. The English artist is depicted as being good-­natured, but with a weakness for taxing personalities. In this case, not only was Beaton anti-­ Semitic (a trait he wasn’t aware that Stein knew about him), but he generated great consternation for drunkenly wandering off one rainy day to carouse with a squadron of Senegalese soldiers stationed nearby. In the midst of such hubbub, Stein surrounded herself with more and more of Rose’s canvases, which she gravitated toward almost in spite of herself. For

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Rose’s largely nonfigurative artwork inflamed her anxieties regarding the post-­cubist art world’s direction. It was part and parcel of the “new creative idea”55 whose pulse she felt in Christian Bérard, Eugène Berman, and Tche­lit­chew. Without calling it surrealist, connecting it to surrealism’s afore­ mentioned “higher flights,” invoking Breton’s name, or specifying what this “new creative idea” might be, Stein describes her increasing fascination with the post-­Dada painters: “Gertrude Stein was at first not interested in this group of painters as a group but only in the russian [Tche­litchew]. This interest gradually increased and then she was bothered. [. . .] There was a distinctly new creative idea. Where had it come from. Gertrude Stein always says to the young painters when they complain that she changes her mind about their work, it is not I that change my mind about the pictures, but the paintings disappear into the wall, I do not see them any more and then they go out of the door naturally.”56 So she could be a fickle patron. Evidenced in her vacillating opinions regarding Tchelitchew and Rose, trying to pinpoint a worthy heir to Picasso proved a daunting task. Stein first became acquainted with Rose’s paintings at Hugnet’s apartment.57 At the Gallery Bonjean thereafter, “She saw a picture of a poet sitting by a waterfall. Who did that, she said. A young englishman, Francis Rose, was the reply. Oh yes I am not interested in his work. How much is that picture, she said.”58 Filled with unease, Stein continues purchasing Rose’s creations without trying to meet the man himself. This pattern holds until she hangs over thirty Roses in her Parisian flat. The Toklas-­narrator in The Autobiog­ raphy of Alice B. Toklas states at one point, “Gertrude Stein was very much upset while having this done. I asked her why she was doing it if it upset her so much. She said she could not help it, that she felt that way about it but to change the whole aspect of the room by adding these thirty pictures was very upsetting. There the matter rested for some time.”59 The story ends with Stein and Rose meeting and getting along just fine, yet the ambivalence he—and surrealism as a whole by extension—inspires never quite fades. The one responsible for introducing Stein to Faÿ, Crevel was, finally, Stein’s favorite surrealist writer. In truth, he was one of Stein’s favorites, surrealist or no: “Of all the young men who came to the house I think I liked René the best. He had french charm, which when it is at its most charming is more charming even than american charm, charming as that can be. Marcel Duchamp and René Crevel are perhaps the most complete examples of this french charm. We were very fond of René. He was young and violent and ill and revolutionary and sweet and tender. Gertrude Stein and René are very fond of each other, he writes her most delightful en-



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glish letters, and she scolds him a great deal.” In such remarks, a more charitable reading of surrealism can be apprehended, one that surpasses Stein’s flatter visual generalizations. Stein turns most sympathetic toward surrealism as an ideological practice when it is filtered through Crevel him­ self: “René was then and has remained ever since a devout sur­réal­iste. He needs and needed, being a Frenchman, an intellectual as well as a basal justification for the passionate exaltation in him. This he could not find, being of the immediate postwar generation, in either religion or patriotism, the war having destroyed for his generation, both patriotism and religion as a passion. Surréalism has been his justification. It has clarified for him the confused negation in which he lived and loved. This he alone of his generation has really succeeded in expressing, a little in his earlier books, and in his last book, The Clavecin of Diderot very adequately and with the brilliant violence that is his quality.”61 The earlier books Stein alludes to include My Body and I (1925),62 a confessional narrative tracing the existential pangs and pleasures of solitude. Crevel’s persona in this memoir resembles Timon of Athens, save with the surrealist’s special tenderness for the impoverished and criminally inclined. Crevel’s beloved Paris is populated by pimps, whores, and boxers. The underworld, as he kept telling Stein, remained one of his greatest sources of inspiration.63 In My Body and I, Crevel bemoans how “under the pretext of civilization we are forced to live among ersatz objects” at the expense of “enriching our existence with some magnificent and brutal enchantment.”64 Through dreams, séances, sleeping fits, and evening prowls, he pushes to reenchant the everyday, although his belief that the poor and outcast hold a spiritual edge over the bourgeois has, of course, been derided as a typically bourgeois gesture. Surrealism merely exoticizes the ends of the class spectrum for the movement’s critics. Being frank about sexual matters forms a large part of the surrealist project to reenchant, beguile. For Crevel, eroticism involved, as he says above, the “brutal.” Like many other surrealists, Crevel’s tastes leaned toward the sadomasochistic. “Our sexual endeavors can themselves,” he outright states, “be explained quite appropriately by the axiom: ‘Pleasure is a function of pain.’”65 The spread of violence and death obsesses him. Crevel voyeuristically lingers over an actress’s death by drowning, a murderess’s delectable appearance in court. Scars left over from a young hustler’s self-­administered cuts to his own wrists only impress. While pondering whether to bed or break up with a female dancer he knows, Crevel associates his impersonal outlook with certain childhood habits: “As a child, far more than my brothers and sisters, I would stick pins through insects 60

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and butterflies. The elegant handle of a knife in a red madness.”66 When he gazes upon an attractive ring fighter, Crevel muses, “I would like, with the point of a knife, to make drawings on his body. The way tasteful pastry chefs decorate their cakes at fairs.”67 He doesn’t mind pointing the knife at himself either. He dutifully sprinkles masochistic phrases such as “I enjoy suffering” and “I know how to torture myself” against a backdrop of emotional detachment, where the author “has no need of things or even other people.”68 This distance isn’t altogether unfeigned. Like Stein, Crevel held an ambivalent attitude toward others and time’s passage. He yearned to be alone, yet feared aloneness. He sought to purge himself of his memories, yet lovingly salvaged his past in his literary output. But Crevel’s alienation ran deeper than Stein’s. Her younger companion mostly expressed “boredom and disgust”69 with the carnal. Despite his break with the church, Crevel divulged an Augustinian contempt for the flesh, a sentiment exacerbated by his internalized homophobia and struggles with tuberculosis. As a sana­ torium patient, the body is what failed him, the vessel of his own frailty. In his letters to Stein, he reports multiple operations, aftereffects (in­clud­ ing some hand paralysis), and mental exhaustion. “All is well now with my body. German surgeon cut a nerve in thorax” (De­cem­ber 1927).70 “Alas for me, once more I am ill, and of one terrible illness not so grave but douloureuse, it’s abcés in my leg, and from a week in the bed and for 3 or 4 days again” (June 1929).71 More poignantly: “Nothing new in my life. It’s always illness and silence. / Solitude / Yes, Gertrud [sic] / Mountain / again / and for ever, / . . . never” (1932).72 As an uneasy fixture on Breton’s homo­ phobic scene, his body elicits shame. Crevel could be one of those self-­hating homo­sexuals Stein gossips about in Ernest Hemingway’s A Moveable Feast (1964), if a tad more steeped in the Catholic ethos of tragic dignification. He melancholically recounts cross-­dressing parties, hustlers worn down by “tuberculosis and cocaine,”73 forlorn camp queens, and cruises. An encounter between a “drunken Englishman” and a “sad pimp” culminates in “nothing but shame for the flesh and the mind.”74 For every moment Crevel approaches the body like a revelatory terrain, asking his readers, “How could we not want to lose ourselves in lands offered by a voluptuous atlas,”75 there are more where the body looms as a site of perpetual displacement. Crevel even adopts a disembodied voice at times, addressing himself from a bird’s-­eye view. Coupling, of­ten a means of self-­distraction, fails to bring about communion. Stein never went this far. She had Toklas, loving memories of vacationing together in south­ern Europe, a homey living situation, financial secu-



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rity, and what Hemingway calls lesbian “patriotism.” By temperament, Stein, the upbeat Jewish secularist, and Crevel, the recovering Catholic, held different existential outlooks. The Crevel who laments, “Why was I raised to follow the precepts of a religion that exalts sorrow and suffering?”77 hasn’t left the Judeo-­Christian fold yet. The human race is reduced to “puppets of suffering”78 in his worldview, with suffering being a marker for moral seriousness. The old questions haunt him still (“From whom did we get this human flesh? An answer is required”79), even if their traditional answers aren’t satisfying enough. Caught in the right mood, Crevel will even admit to a wishy-­washy agnosticism: “I am hardly able to believe that death could be an evaporation, a descent into nothingness. What’s more, I have always found the idea of nothingness to be inconceivable.”80 The few meager comforts before all this uncertainty and earthly disappointment consist of an ascetic solitude, itself described in baptismal terms (“Only solitude can wash me? Yes”81); sleep; and death. Suicide, he concludes (and as his own actions eventually attest), is a courageous revolt against the meaninglessness of human existence. But when Crevel ends My Body and I with a series of poetic invocations, he underlines their futility in the same breath: “When the battle is over, when the curtain is down, I am alone, my hands empty, my heart empty. I am alone.”82 These last words negate the will to even play devil’s advocate. For all of his meditations, his poses, his cruelties, his compassion, his tirades against religion, and his resurrecting church doctrines under vari­ous guises, nothing either matters or changes. Diderot’s Harpsichord (1932) expresses much more faith in transforming reality as opposed to escaping it altogether. A smidgen of sexual disgust persists, but Crevel’s overall tenor is now exuberantly satirical. Avoiding the novelistic trappings that so rankled Breton at the time, this mock-­academic treatise rattles off a string of obscure apho­risms targeting bourgeois culture (although Crevel dutifully admits his bourgeois roots), capitalism, rac­ ism, conformism, fatalism, God, and the puritan guilt his memory ­inspires. In the wake of Breton’s Second Manifesto of Surrealism (1930), and surrealism’s burgeoning interest in how our material circumstances shape our living habits, the movement unfurls into a more concentrated attack against socially conditioned attitudes for Crevel, particularly as pertaining to sex and insanity. Surrealism becomes a synonym for subversion itself in this context: “Not a school, but a movement—not a museum or an anthology, but, on the contrary, from its first sentence, a sweep of museums, scattered anthologies—surrealism, which meant sacrificing neither dream to action, nor action to dream, has always worked towards their synthesis. As a bouquet of the most subversive forces and ideas, if it began by breaking 76

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the breakable screens of poetic and intellectual neutralities, it will not stop along the way. Surrealism attacks the walls and by walls, I mean, in the proper and figurative sense, walls of ideal stones, petrified ideas, ­obstacles to the progress of man, constraints to his body, challenges to his thought.”83 In the quest to liberate the “pitiful man, man between the walls [. . .] who, during [his] childhood, for fear of the night, of the unknown, hid under the sheets”84—to “stir up the unconscious, from a molehill, where the desires of man were curled up, crippled in fear of homicidal avalanches”85—­ surrealism avails itself of “sleep, transcription of dreams, automatic writing, simulations of delirium.”86 All of this constitutes Crevel’s brand of surrealism. And he remained the movement’s authority for Stein, despite Diderot’s Harpsichord simply elaborating upon Breton’s ideas, even closing with a definitional sound bite from Breton’s First Manifesto: “Surrealism. Masculine Noun. Pure automatism, by which it is proposed to express either verbally, or in writing, or in any other way, the actual functioning of thought. Dictation of thought in the absence of any control exercised by reason, apart from any aesthetic or moral preoccupation.”87 The source of Stein’s confidence may have something to do with Crevel being one of the few surrealists to acknowledge her in print. In Diderot’s Harpsichord, he mentions Stein’s name as he deflates the notion that “language was given to man to hide his thoughts.”88 According to Gertrude Stein (and Crevel takes care to enunciate her full name), “this little cunningness, conceals, behind a cyni­cism of the façade, its fear of intimacy.”89 For the opposite held most interest for Stein and her surrealist contemporaries. Language was given not to hide, but to arrest our thoughts in the most viscerally pressing sense. Sharing such spontaneous impressions generates ever more emotionally intimate moments among writers and readers. In private as well, Crevel expressed admiration for Stein’s short story “Melanctha.” He even agreed to translate Three Lives into French on that basis.90 He sent his published Oxford lecture to Stein. Stein, in turn, mailed him a copy of The Making of Ameri­cans.91 In an early 1934 letter, he recounts feeling properly flattered upon reading The Autobiography of Alice B. Tok­ las.92 His last letters to her around Janu­ary 1935, to add one last example, contain the wish to compose a French version of The Making of Ameri­cans. Whether among themselves or before the public, Crevel remained Stein’s affectionate reader and friend.

i Personal exchanges spilled over into creative ones. In later works such as The World Is Round (1939), To Do: A Book of Alphabets and Birthdays (com-



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posed 1940), Paris France (1940), Ida: A Novel (1941), Mrs. Reynolds (composed 1940–43), and Wars I Have Seen (1945), classic surrealist themes abound: the marvelous, an appetite for extreme juxtapositions (that is to say the collage principle popu­larized through Lautréamont’s evocation of a sewing machine coincidentally “meeting” an umbrella on an operating table93), dream imagery, the child’s creatively uninhibited mind-­set, endless paradoxes, the obsession with sleeping, and great whiffs of the occult. Ida, for instance, blends nursery school rhymes with “adult” content, attenuating the cult of childhood in the process. The logic of dreams molds the novel’s content and form. Syntax only loosely follows textbook guidelines, while Ida’s everyday life assumes a fantastical dimension, marked by spectral visions, teleportation, radical coincidences, and temporal distortions. Time operates elliptically—moving and standing still; progressing, yet also hovering in an eternal present. A text of attention deficit or surplus spins out, where too little attention to one thing at a time or too much attention to several things at the same time occurs. To reiterate, even as Stein dismissed surrealism on multiple occasions, she mingled with its talent, remained attracted to its visuals, and sympathized with more than a few of its core principles, wittingly or unwittingly. When we return to The Autobiography of Alice B. Toklas, Stein’s description of Spanish cubism’s origins reveals a nuanced understanding of the collage technique that surrealism would borrow and make its own: In the shops in Barcelona instead of post cards they had square little frames and inside it was placed a cigar, a real one, a pipe, a bit of handkerchief etcetera, all absolutely the arrangement of many a cubist picture and helped out by cut paper representing other objects. That is the modern note that in Spain had been done for centuries. Picasso in his early cubist pictures used printed letters as did Juan Gris to force the painted surface to measure up to something rigid, and the rigid thing was the printed letter. Gradually instead of using the printed thing they painted the letters and all was lost, it was only Juan Gris who could paint with such intensity a printed letter that it still made the rigid contrast. And so cubism came little by little but it came.94

“Rigid contrasts” persisted beyond the canvas. André Salmon’s inebriated behavior at a dinner party held in Henri Rousseau’s honor attests to the ease with which Stein could appreciate a surrealist tableau. Getting ready to head home from Picasso’s, Toklas stops by the atelier to pick up her things and spots Salmon: “There on the couch lay Salmon peacefully sleep-

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ing and surrounding him, half chewed, were a box of matches, a petit bleu and my yellow fantaisie. Imagine my feelings even at three o’clock in the morning. However Salmon woke up very charming and very polite and we all went out into the street together. All of a sudden with a wild yell Salmon rushed down the hill.”95 The beautifully strewn objects combined with Salmon’s changing states through­out the night evoke all of surrealism’s drive to live in a state of perpetual abandonment, to turn life into art. Now, sifting through Stein’s surrealist leanings begins with what complicates the endeavor. No matter how generously she gave of her time and purse, she was erratic in her friendships, dismissing acquaintances by card on occasion. And disagreements with surrealism’s core tenets obscure the rest. In his introduction to Maurice Nadeau’s seminal The History of Surrealism (1965), Roger Shattuck writes of Stein, “It is practically impossible in the case of profoundly Ameri­can writers like Cummings, Henry Miller, Gertrude Stein, and William Carlos Williams to detect any evidence of more than minor surrealist influence. They had found their voice before coming upon the theory and practice of the Paris schools. The author whose near-­automatic writing appears to be most closely related to the surrealists is Gertrude Stein; yet her preoccupations with her own genius and style made her practically impervious to influence except from painting.”96 By normalizing the abnormal to the extent that it becomes the norm, surrealists shift society’s expectations of what can, is, and should be done in daily existence. By blurring the boundaries between the unreal and real, nonsense and sense, they delegitimize these binaries from the inside out. Such dualities deconstruct upon the surrealist dictate that they were never opposed to begin with. The realms of imagination and action consequently broaden. Individual free­dom knows almost no bounds when the incredible becomes matter-­of-­fact. Surrealism is revolutionary in this regard. It revives our sense of the wondrous in lived experience, redefining reality to include the thrillingly bizarre and unpredictable. If Stein’s creative gestures appear unsettling, it is because our notions of literature and the world it belongs to, the surreal purist would say, are impoverished. But Stein is no purist in this sense. She doesn’t envisage a triumphant future originating from sexual revolution, nor does the term “revolution” particularly compel her. Surrealists were repulsed by middle-­class decorum. Herself the daughter of upwardly mobile Jewish merchants, Stein viewed the middle class favorably for its industriousness and down-­to-­earth decency. Unlike Breton, Dalí, Desnos, Meret Oppenheim, Toyen, Valentine Hugo, or Leonor Fini,97 Stein isn’t interested in surrealism’s grandiose faith in desire renewing the world. She may revel in the senses, not un-



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like the Rimbaud close to Breton’s heart who argues that poetry springs from “the unchaining of all the senses.”98 Scenes of lesbian domesticity inspirit many of her holiday pieces from the 1910s and 1920s, with frequent allusions to being pleasing, jelly, butter, wives, lindo, cream, wetness, pinkness, coming, midriffs (one poem even earns the title “Lifting Belly”), clams, eggs, melons, peaches, carpets, pearls, and cows (Stein’s code word for orgasms and female genitalia).99 True to its title, “All Sunday” (composed 1915) traces the pleasures surrounding a lazy weekend: “A slender person growing fatter makes a false cow. Cows are very nice. They are between legs.”100 An inventory of erotically charged household objects and actions accumulates. Yet Stein’s literature never indulges in a gothically Sadean libertinism. She doesn’t see art as flowering from what Desnos jots in an endnote for Calixto (1943) as “the rapport of poetry with love.”101 There are no female fig­ures gripped in the throes of sado­maso­ chistic desire, torturing or being tortured in a number of inventive ways. There is no sublime, soul-­devouring love directed toward a woman epitomizing primordial mystery, myth, madness—ultimately, grace. There is no “Nadja,” as Breton would have it. (Here, one is tempted to recall Chagall’s My Life [1960], an autobiography saturated with such reverence mixed with fear toward its female subjects. Chagall is in love with many women and, as the truism goes, with the idea of love. We have Nina, ­Aniouta, Thea, and so on. Chagall’s wife, one of Thea’s companions, materializes in particularly romantic terms: “Her silence is mine. Her eyes, mine. It’s as if she had known me for a long time, and knew all my childhood, my present, and my future; as if she had been watching over me, reading my inmost thoughts, although I have never seen her before. / I knew that this was she – my wife. / Her pale face, her eyes. How big, round and black they are! They are my eyes, my soul.”102 The artist’s first impression of his life’s great romance borrows much of the romantic tradition’s language: the mystic communion between souls; soulfulness; a pale, refined beauty possessing piercingly large eyes; a seraph in the flesh. Breton, not incidentally, describes an actress using almost the exact same platitudes: “Dark, with brown hair, I don’t recall. Young. Magnificent eyes that m ­ ingle languor with subtlety, cruelty, despair.”103 Not to be left out, Desnos’s Calixto indulges in phrases such as “A trousseau of fevered passion and love”104 and “voluptuous pleasure”105 at its most complacent. In this Parisian underworld of prostitutes and the impoverished, everything is hunger and thirst, body heat, and heated glances.) There are no Madonnas and there are no whores in Stein’s twilight kingdoms. There are none to worship before just as there are none to slay. A romantic exultation steeped in terror, thirst,

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confusion, or sadistic aggression is nowhere to be found. If Breton hungers to, in his own words, “meet, at night and in a woods, a beautiful naked woman” in order to play out a fantasy where he can most likely lose his “presence of mind,”106 Stein tries her best to empty her scenarios of all such passions. She might share Breton’s tendency to speak about women from the outside in rather than the inside out, but that is because no one is accorded a psychological interior in her later fiction. Only surfaces, not shadowy depths, dominate. In Stein’s late oeuvre—years after “Lifting Belly” (composed 1915–17), “Sacred Emily” (composed 1913), and A Book Con­ cluding with as a Wife Has a Cow: A Love Story (1926)—all desire is incidental. The point isn’t how love can enrich life but to forge a terrain where love and other emotions become beside the point. Gone, then, is the testosterone-­fueled sensuality rampant in most surrealist writings. Stein’s surrealist creations simply lack that panting urgency. In Desnos’s Mourning for Mourning (1924), the reader floats over lines of glamorous pinup girls. There is “a gorgeous brunette with limpid eyes [. . .] naked except for blindfolded breasts”107 who steps out of the crowd to arrest the narrator’s gaze. Her breasts may be bound, but her vision is not. To Desnos’s delight, the beauty goes on to utter Delphic pronouncements on the nature of longing. Liberty or Love! (1924) likewise resembles an extended wet dream. The novel’s protagonist, Corsaire Sanglot, is a twentieth-­century Sadean hero. His surname recalls “sanguine.” All of the word’s resonances—the reddish, bloody, buoyant—converge in Sanglot’s rejoicing in the flesh, in its violent sundering through the act of love. Walking through Paris’s streets, Sanglot stares at one “Louise Lame,” aroused by how “the heavily laden evening breeze would be rushing in under her coat, caressing her hips and the underside of her breasts.”108 At the same time, Desnos’s penchant for sexual hysteria translates into dozens of scenes where thighs are being forced apart; head mistresses whip their teenage charges, who retaliate by undressing and orally pleasuring their tormentors; rape role-­playing wins the day as thirty girl boarders violated by their lady principal’s lover flagellate themselves after his departure, so excited by the experience; and there is screaming, cleavage, pederasty, but also contempt for queeny homosexuals with “female hearts, brains like filter-­paper.”109 In books like these, Desnos flaunts surrealism’s macho appetites and masculine insecurities. In Liberty or Love! the “Sperm Drinkers’ Club”—a title pitting surrealism’s homosexual energies and dandyism against its internalized homophobia and dread of the effeminate—is a thinly veiled stand-­in for Breton’s coterie. But its philosophical musings are hardly more than male boastings over conquests. Club members are



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endlessly extracting sexual favors from women at emotional gunpoint, compelled by a “desire to vanquish.”110 Sexual relations are predatory and brief. Emotional intimacy is framed by feelings of “panic and sacred horror,”111 with Desnos anticipating the mood behind Nadja’s ending words: “Beauty will be CONVULSIVE or will not be at all.”112 Surpassing convulsion, death agony—beyond tales of seducing, then abandoning, sixteen-­ year-­old typists, Sanglot toys with death itself. A misogynistically reified nihilism reigns supreme when Sanglot remembers how he drips ambergris all over his lover Mabel’s body, then breaks open the bottle and jabs it into her eyes, lips, stomach, and chest. He mutilates her in a trance, drunk on the scent of ambergris. Reality assumes the hallucinatory glow of a sleep paralysis episode. One peers through the fog of Desnos’s Paris to make out such sadistic rituals between the dying and cultists of death. Beyond discontinuing the fetish for chivalric romance and sadomaso­ chistic melodramas, Stein refrains, too, from flirting with communism, inciting pub­lic riots, or claiming automatism as a central writing technique. An indifference toward utopia settles the divide. While surrealism failed as a po­liti­cal movement, remaining an aesthete’s to the last, and caused no less confusion for co-­opting an empirical-­realist framework despite outwardly renouncing secular rationalism, it remained militantly invested in the question of civic justice. (In truth, the movement eluded even the aesthete, for Breton always deemed art as a means to one end: a complete lifestyle overhaul. By equating artists with doers as opposed to makers, he harks back to Vaché, not to mention the ever restless performer Tzara, who maintained in the periodical Le Surréalisme au Service de la Revolution: “It is perfectly evident today that one can be a poet without ever having written a line, that there exists a quality of poetry in the street, in commercial performance, anywhere, the confusion is great, it is poetic.”113) Through recourse to psychographically tapped Freudianisms (of­ten of the erotic variety), surrealists encourage the pub­lic to challenge whatever constrains everyday life, be it socioeconomic conditions or cultural taboos. Hence, we have the moral seriousness accorded to the child fig­ure. Children are far less socially inhibited, far more imaginatively malleable than adults. They absorb the world with fresh eyes, living out their fantasies unapolo­geti­ cally. Playing pretend prompts participants to ask “why not” as opposed to “why.” At the same time, children exude a sexual frankness untamed by adult decorum. They are, in theory (although such theorizing crumbles around the edges in later chapters), ideal advocates for a literature devoted to spiritual and sensory liberation—in Stein’s case, a literature liberated from narrative conventions.

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In many ways the surrealist’s self-­appointed task to shock the world into living with more passionate conviction—or, if one prefers, with additional lyricism, zest, spontaneity, whimsy, insolence—is an old one. It extends West­ern modernity’s faith in the artist as prophet instead of craftsman. To the utopian vision that surrealism invokes, though, Stein largely dissented. In her last memoir, Wars I Have Seen, she recalls how, even as a teenager in Oakland, “I was then already sceptical about Utopias, naturally so, I liked habits but I did not like that habits should be known as mine. Habits like dogs dogs have habits but they do not like to be told about their habits, and the only way to have a Utopia is not only to have habits but to be liked to be told about these habits, and this I did not like.”114 Any po­ liti­cal project requires drafting a set program, an act at odds with Stein’s secretive tendencies. A little under a hundred pages later, Stein returns to her wariness regarding utopian discourse—this time, through what she perceives to be Germany’s nationalist ethos: “You cannot have a house, wood to burn and food to eat and the servant to stay, not all at once and there must always be setbacks, and there must always be the need of superstition to stop anything from going too bad or too well just like that, and people like the Germans never understand that, they dream fairy tales where everything is as it was or was not, and they make music which makes them feel like that.”115 She affirms the value of in­di­vidual free­dom, yet the large-­scale social restructuring that surrealism’s revolutionary sympathies necessitate feels as distant as the “fairy tales” described above. Stein was impatient with traditional fairy tales and so created her own. But what elfin tales are these? The children of mixed allegiances, the irrational, and human frailty, these stories are, nonetheless, Stein’s love letters to the chaotic present. Far from correcting or sidestepping the complicated, the elderly Stein relished it. Such openness claimed Stein, if unknowingly unto herself, for surrealism in a time and place where all the old convictions were overrun by doubt, where too many conversations dissolved into double­speak. “When you are in a country that is being occupied by an enemy, by two enemies in a manner of speaking,” Stein writes of Vichy France, everybody is funny, that is they feel and they act in such different ways at any time. You think they think one thing and they act another. One country priest who outrages his congregation by preaching against the Ameri­cans, is delighted to meet me and makes a special effort to love my dog and love me. Others who are said to be one thing say other things and under conditions distinctly unfavorable for them, oh it is all so complicated and ­every day and in every way I like the complications being so complicated.



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The 1914–1918 war was a simple war with simple feelings and all the veterans of that war are confused with this war, they do not understand, and they cannot find themselves, everything is so opposed to anything that is straightforward, I must say I like it, I like things that look as if they were there when they are elsewhere. I do like it. I do not like to fish in troubled waters but I do like to see the troubled water and the fish and the fishermen. I suppose I do not like to fish in troubled waters because I do not care about fishing at all, but that is another matter.116

Even if her temperament bars her from “fishing” or stirring up trouble with Vaché’s panache, she still appreciates the gravitas of the pursuit. If Stein’s surrealism substantiates itself through the spirit of self-­ consciously eccentric contradictions, the way in which she contradicts her previous creative stances becomes of paramount interest. Unlike the Stein who wrote Tender Buttons (1914), Lucy Church Amiably (1927), or Four Saints in Three Acts (composed 1927–28), Stein’s surrealist alter ego returns us to chronological narrative, the literal, the literally accessible, and others. By chronological narrative, one simply refers to stories observing Aristotelian time. Stein imparted “complicated” (to recycle Stein’s favored term) stories, but stories nonetheless. By summoning the marvelous in a his­tori­cally situated world, Stein joined the surrealists in their own inadvertent crusade on history’s behalf. For as much as Breton and his companions ridiculed the past, especially France’s high literary pantheon ­(Anatole France, Victor Hugo, Voltaire, et cetera), they could not do without it. They clamored against “History” in a rhetoric appropriated from one of France’s most famous his­tori­cal events, the French Revolution, all the while historicizing themselves as epoch-­making fig­ures.117 More generally, Breton glossed over the conventional wisdom that the present cannot be severed from the past: surrealism grows out of, and sustains itself on, bourgeois values insofar as it seeks to invert them. Add to these motifs Stein’s later emphasis on the timeline of dreamlike prophecies, and her return to the his­tori­cal solidifies. Ida and Mrs. Reynolds feature the fantastical, not only because war courts the darker realities we encounter during sleep, but also because their casts obsess over fantastical visions portending Ger­many’s defeat. Indeed, history progressively feels “inevitable,” something undistinguishable from fate, for the voice behind Wars I Have Seen. If only destiny would run its course, Stein bemoans, the war might end. In finding relief in the unconscious, in the hope afforded by omens glimpsed in dreams, Stein evolved from being a writer mostly dedicated to practicing a cool, impersonal creative trance to a moonlighting Freudian.

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The bid to both elude and confront time’s passing reconfirms the drift of Stein’s wartime meditations, even in transitional pieces such as “A Diary” (1927) and “History or Messages from History” (1930). As delineated in her lectures “Composition as Explanation” (1925) and “The Gradual Making of The Making of Ameri­cans” (1935), her aesthetic program for weaving present progressives into a nonlinear or even static narrative framework (because gridlocked in circular arias), all with an eye to conveying the “continuous present” in which consciousness abides, gradually gives way to a reexamination of beginnings, middles, and ends. Writing in the “continuous present” was meant to spur readers to immerse themselves in the moment. If everything unfolds in the present tense—and idiosyncratically enough to cloud our basic grasp of the situation—one cannot be distracted by what has gone before or will follow. Reading morphs into a wonderfully immediate experience. Yet Stein, the war memoirist, gazes beyond the instantaneous. When personal histories become a matter of life and death under Hitler’s watch, to historicize a life assumes new urgency. Ergo, the reader could speculate, Stein’s fascination with dates and the chronological sequence of events in Mrs. Reynolds and Wars I Have Seen. To recognize a story as such, it cannot be incomprehensible in the manner of Stein’s most experimental works, and this brings us to the literally accessible. Around the time of the Second World War, an era of total narratives, Stein veers away from hermetic forms. In Stein the marvelous is served, if not exactly in the realist style of Breton’s Nadja or Louis Aragon’s Paris Peasant (1926), then at least with a directness comparable to The Auto­ biography of Alice B. Toklas’s. Aside from odd ducks such as Desnos’s automatically composed Rrose Sélavy (1922–23), whose aphorisms strain against conventional diction in their unexpected subjects performing unexpected (or outright unfeasible) actions, the majority of surrealist texts leave conventional lexi-­syntactical structures untouched. Like its visual counterpart, literary surrealism more or less innovates on the level of content, not form. It preserves the principles of grammar, much as surrealist paintings retain the vocabulary of representational shapes. Dalí’s elephants may appear impossibly spindle-­legged, yet they are still elephants. Breton’s heroines may possess an otherworldly allure, yet we have no trouble discerning their heroine status. The outside world may be altered, yet its language remains intact. Otherwise, how could we embrace miracles if unable to recognize them? (As a point of contrast, Stein’s “In the Grass [On Spain]” [1913] is so doggedly nonreferential that it is difficult to reconstruct any happenings, let alone surrealist ones.) Utilitarian in this regard, surrealism bridges the philosophical gap between nonrepresentational and popu­lar



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art, articulating the impossible in a way that is still digestible in layman’s terms. It functions as a subset of modernism’s mythmaking by doing so, for myths likewise convey the supernatural as transparently as possible. Without believing in their myths as the ancients did or treating them as windows into an enduring moral universe, surrealists adopt the semantic populism and characters belonging to classical mythology. In revisiting the his­tori­cal and the legible, Stein gratified her social instincts. Communicating to a wider audience had become a priority at last. The rationale appears intuitive enough when one rereads her WWII memoirs. If no small portion of each day is spent evading enemy patrols, dodging bombs, foraging for food, ducking stray skirmishes led by the French militia, or trying to send and receive letters, feeling alienated becomes a matter of course. One is so deprived of information that any genial human contact means something. Any morsel of reassuring news, whether from the radio or neighbors, goes a long way. To be heard assumes a desperation it never had before. Stein’s tendency to break away from the crowd as an artistic loner never vanished, but it no longer held pride of place when the safety afforded by numbers could not be done without. When Stein muses in Paris France, “After all human beings are like that. When they are alone they want to be with others and when they are with others they want to be alone and war in a kind of way concentrating all this destroys it and intensifies it,”118 she indicates the ease with which war accommodates the conflict between the writer resisting mainstream literary methods and the civilian starved for company when danger strikes, as war exists as the amalgamation of human ambivalence. Stylistically, the will to seek out others yet stay apart plays itself out through Stein’s vacillation between hermetic and popu­lar writing modes. Thematically, it surfaces in the mood swings her characters undergo. Ida’s are the most pronounced. She fantasizes about living alone in a timeless bubble but compulsively mingles with others and enters beauty pageants, where time’s imprint on the body distinguishes victories from defeats. From the question of how to relate and speak to others, we come to the end of all narratives. As the literal and marvelous collapse together under war’s duress, Stein broaches the practical limits of art itself. She reflects on where art may have no place in a world consumed with brute survival. All art, not just the avant-­garde kind, faces its own impotence during such his­tori­cal moments. In Wars I Have Seen, the anecdote of a three-­year-­old boy looking wistfully at three replica apples decorating a lady’s hat, and commenting, “I would like to have three apples like that,”119 casts peacetime Europe’s mania for still lifes in a frivolous light. Before the war, it

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would raise no eyebrows to associate apples with painting. Now, apples acquire a poignancy they didn’t quite have before. When the general population is going hungry, is there any space left to think about fruit on canvas? Based on her actions, Stein’s answer is a resounding affirmative. If anything, art becomes more important for her—a psychic safety valve, a pleasure that sustains her spirits during her leanest hours. Like Crevel, who undermines his own nihilism by committing it to paper, Stein’s mounting wartime publications belie those testimonies on art’s fruitlessness. Both authors still wrote, and copiously so. The end of all narratives, it turns out, opens up an endless cycle of beginnings.

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G

limpsed in Stein’s more abstract works penned after Q. E. D. (composed 1903), The Making of Ameri­cans, and Three Lives, one major thing that unites Stein and the surrealists is their pursuit of two heroic, if admittedly quixotic, goals: 1) realizing an utterly primal, spontaneous state of mind; and 2) capturing objects and happenings without the interference of conventional associations. In theory, by doing the former one arrives at the latter, and vice versa. Stein was less intrigued in the mystical self-­knowledge that the surrealists professed (their poetic revelations originate in the subconscious, hers in an intensely depersonalized waking state), but both tout improvisational styles that track the mind in motion. Unmediated by language rules or internal censors, the serious author, according to avant-­gardists, sharpens the reader’s experiential awareness. In a paradoxical twist, though, this carefully primed language becomes claimed under an uncompromising realism. Like the French naturalists, Stein and many of her surrealist contemporaries saw themselves as passively recording perceptual data, notwithstanding the fact that all recording devices stylize the world to a degree. If Stein spoke of achieving an “exact reproduction of outer or inner ­reality” on the page,1 Breton likened himself to a recording device in his first surrealist manifesto. In 1924, having pitched surrealism as “psychic automatism in its pure state,”2 he declares in the same document, “But we, who have made no effort whatsoever to filter, who in our works have made ourselves into simple receptacles of so many echoes, modest record­ ing instruments who are not mesmerized by the drawings we are making, perhaps we serve an even nobler cause. Thus do we render with integrity the ‘talent’ which has been lent to us. You might as well speak of the talent of this platinum ruler, this mirror, this door, and of the sky, if you like. We do not have any talent; ask Philippe Soupault.”3 Individual talent vanishes when the artist becomes conceptualized as a mechanical transmitter, a communications satellite streaming phenomenological content. The history of representational art is fueled by the ambition to carve out and preserve slivers of the world. Painters sought to finesse their three-­ dimensional optical illusions, while writers ventured further into the pri-

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vate domain, eventually brushing up against their innermost thoughts. The advent of the camera, as Susan Sontag so eloquently puts forth in On Photography (1977), rhetorically heightened all such aesthetic queries. Twentieth-­century art now aspired to transcend itself, impart audiences with a sense of life more alive than everyday living. The camera became the ideal metaphor for this endeavor. As distant as he was from Breton’s company, Christopher Isherwood echoes the Frenchman’s sentiments fifteen years later in Goodbye to Berlin (1939): “I am a camera, with its shutter open, quite passive, recording, not thinking.”4 In a letter to fellow artist and patron Katherine Dreier, Man Ray similarly conveys his keenness to recreate unmediated sense perceptions as a photographer. “I am trying to make my photography automatic,” he asserts, “to use my camera as I would a typewriter – in time I shall attain this and still avoid the irrelevant for which scientific instruments have such a strong penchant.”5 The irony becomes that where the writer searches for a visual analogy, the photographer here rustles around for a verbal one, still enthralled by Breton’s psychographic sessions. Such synesthesia, a vaunted surrealist motif, runs through­out a num­ ber of Stein’s passing remarks. But for different reasons. Stein of­ten subverts visual-­verbal boundaries by claiming that writers write with their eyes and painters paint with anything but. In “A Transatlantic Interview 1946,” Stein maintains, “I write with my eyes, not with my ears or mouth. I hate lecturing, because you begin to hear yourself talk, because sooner or later you hear your voice, and you do not hear what you say. You just hear what they hear you say. As a matter of fact, as a writer I write entirely with my eyes. The words as seen by my eyes are the important words, and the ears and mouth do not count.”6 Similarly, in The Autobiography of Alice B. Tok­ las, Stein’s version of Toklas comments, “As [Stein] says eyes to her were more important than ears and it happened then as always that English was her only language.”7 Stein’s fastidiously crafted voice continues on the next page: “Music [Stein] only cared for during her adolescence. She finds it difficult to listen to it, it does not hold her attention. All of which of course may seem strange because it has been so of­ten said that the appeal of her work is to the ear and to the sub-­conscious. Actually it is her eyes and mind that are active and important and concerned in choosing.”8 Although language’s musicality inspires her from time to time, Stein publicly distances herself from sound poetry due to her low regard for purely phonetic schemes. This official stance probably formed in reaction against ongo­ ing accusations that her language remained haphazard sound play. Hence, the defensive line reiterating her visual interests and lack of aural ones.



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i Amalgamating impressionist and cubist principles devoted to ­perceptual immediacy, Stein saw her object descriptions as being firmly situated within the visual tradition. Regarding her own “Portrait of Mabel Dodge” (1912), Stein muses, “Well, Pablo is doing abstract portraits in painting. I am trying to do abstract portraits in my medium, words”—a sentiment Dodge herself echoes when she reminisces, “In a large studio in Paris, hung with paintings by Renoir, Matisse and Picasso, Gertrude Stein is doing with words what Picasso is doing with paint. She is impelling language to induce new states of consciousness, and in doing so language becomes with her a creative art rather than a mirror of history.”9 In Tender Buttons, in particular, Stein presents a series of household objects. On one hand, they pose as conventional still lifes insofar as the author relates those shapes, colors, materials, and textures constituting her inanimate surroundings. On the other, as in cubist artwork, these forms become splintered within an amoeba-­like network of lines—not the semitransparent planes breaking up a cubist canvas, obviously, but clauses lacking familiar action sequences and subject relations. Herein the analogies between Stein and Picasso proliferate.10 Like a classical painter, Stein begins with the mimetic function. On the Tender Buttons subsection “A Little Bit of a Tumbler”— A shining indication of yellow consists in there having been more of the same color than could have been expected when all four were bought. This was the hope which made the six and seven have no use for any more places and this necessarily spread into nothing. Spread into nothing.

—Stein notes, “I have used this idea in more places. I used to take objects on a table, like a tumbler or any kind of object and try to get the picture of it clear and separate in my mind and create a word relationship between the word and the things seen. ‘A shining indication of yellow’ suggests a tumbler and something in it. ‘when all four were bought’ suggests there were four of them. I try to call to the eye the way it appears by suggestion the way a painter can do it. This is difficult and takes a lot of work and concentration to do it. I want to indicate it without calling in other things. ‘This was the hope which made the six and seven have no use for any more places.’ Places bring up a reality. ‘and this necessarily spread into nothing,’

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which does broken tumbler which is the end of the story.”11 I try to call to the eye the way it appears by suggestion the way a painter can do it—sight precedes both sound and anecdotal associations. An otherwise typical verbal portrait (in authorial intent, that is) recedes from view, however, because of the alien way in which Stein frames the world. Much like the young Picasso who renounced time-­honored shapes and shading, Stein avoided popu­lar literary imagery. Rarely can commonsensical features and practical uses be glimpsed in Tender Buttons and kindred texts. In the process of pushing against entrenched descriptive patterns, Stein dipped into modernism’s mania for the object-­subject divide. Across all mediums, modernists increasingly agonized over baring objects as objectively as possible (what lies beyond clichés, unstained by vulgar platitudes), all the while submerging them in profoundly solitary visions. The subjectivity of subjects, perversely enough, became the most prized object within this emerging ultra-­objectivist strain. The following passage vividly renders this contradiction in terms. Unbeknownst to himself, Thornton Wilder, one of Stein’s closest friends in her later years, internalized her waffling between theory and practice. In a single sweep, Wilder tells us, Stein freezes the stuff of life itself and the mind it permeates: How, in our time, do you describe anything? In the previous centuries writers had managed pretty well by assembling a number of adjectives and adjectival clauses side by side; the reader “obeyed” by furnishing images and concepts in his mind and the resultant “thing” in the reader’s mind corresponded fairly well with that in the writer’s. Miss Stein felt that that process did not work any more. Her painter friends were showing clearly that the corresponding method of “description” had broken down in painting, and she was sure that it had broken down in writing. In the first place, words were no longer precise, they were full of extraneous matter. They were full of “remembering,” and describing a thing in front of us, an “objective thing,” is no time for remembering. Miss Stein felt that writing must accomplish a revolution whereby it could report things as they were in themselves before our minds had appropriated them and robbed them of their objectivity “in pure existing.” [. . .] Miss Stein’s writing is the record of her thoughts, from the beginning, as she “closes in” on them. It is being written before our eyes; she does not, as other writers do, suppress and erase the hesitations, the recapitulations, the connectives, in order to give you the completed fine result of her meditations. She gives us the process.12



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Of course, there is no “purely existing” thing in itself, because all things are broached through the prism of human subjectivity, of which language— an inherently biased, culturally specific medium—forms a part. All things have always been pre-­appropriated in this sense, mediated through our vocabulary, associations, and memories. The writer can defamiliarize, but never wholly disassociate, objects from prior connotations. All this isn’t to negate the realist-­empirical world, but merely to distinguish that “Objectivity,” the ideal, stays once removed from human subjectivity. Without things in themselves, our bodies included, we wouldn’t exist at all—the universe reduced to a vacuum. Yet we never fully know them in an omniscient sense, as objects floating outside human schemata. Pretending to see certain phenomena for the first time is precisely that: pretense. The unknown becomes deciphered in light of the known, subsumed under an anthropic sys­tem of comparative relations. The movement from mind to penned words likewise undergoes multiple mediations. While language structures, no matter how subliminally, the way we see and relate to the world, the entirety of perceptual experience cannot be contained in language. For the world is an overwhelming material matrix in which language and its users originate. To verbalize the inter­sensory interface comprising consciousness is to narrow down the moment, then formulate this locus via an abstract sys­tem. To the last, all art, whether visual or verbal, operates as a synthetic and inter­active activity, not a passive recording. As E. H. Gombrich in his landmark study Art and Illusion (1960) pronounces, “The forms of art, ancient and modern, are not duplications of what the artist has in mind any more than they are duplications of what he sees in the outer world. In both cases they are renderings within an acquired medium, a medium grown up through tradition and skill—that of the artist and that of the beholder.”13 But whether Stein ever stopped trying to immaculately transcribe one-­to-­one perceptual processes, let alone the wider cosmos, remains uncertain.

i Predating Dada’s sound poems, simultaneous readings, and free-­associational yelling matches, Tender Buttons has invited much scrutiny for emulating the workings of consciousness—an endeavor only considered trite now because those like Stein, Joyce, and Woolf brought it to the public’s attention decades ago. When we see things, we see things immediately and all at once in our visual field, itself lacking perceivable edges. (The sec­ond we try to detect an edge, our head turns, and the field extends.) We also do not choose what we see when we open our eyes. We just see the world

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before us, automatically identifying its contours and adjusting our bodies to match. It requires conscious effort to sustain our attention on specific objects. That screening process is what literary realism re-­creates when it selects certain events, things, and people to narrativize over others in sequential order, with any temporal dislocations duly signposted. Tender Buttons gestures toward the tumult of our senses before any such ordering has occurred. Its language sidesteps lexi-­syntactical rules as it summons for us the instantaneous simultaneity by which we behold things. Better yet, Tender Buttons deliberately heightens the threshold of comprehension, so that the world overwhelms readers with a deluge of sights, sounds, smells, tastes, and textures. This spate of unfiltered visual and mental stimuli translates into a highly stylized chaos, one by now commonly recognized in criti­cal circles. Catharine R. Stimpson, for instance, broaches the poem in explicitly phenomenological terms: “Believing in pluralism rather than monism, [Stein] attends to as many phenomena as possible; to as many simultaneous sensuous, sensible and psychic events and sub-­events as she can, and to their relations.”14 Neil Schmitz similarly testifies to Tender Buttons’s play with instantaneous impressions, remarking, “Gertrude Stein’s writing of her experience does follow; it records, moment by moment, the play of her mind with the world before her.”15 The recurring theme for both Stein critics is clear: everything as perceived at once. The simultaneous presentation of objects within one’s cognitive field largely explains Stein’s ties to Picasso, despite how overworked that cubist analogy has become. Like cubist art, Stein’s experimental prose ­juggles conflicting impulses: a self-­assuredly nonrepresentational art betrays aspirations to ultimate representation. Cubism renounces the illusion of three-­ dimensional geometry on canvas to accentuate, instead, the self-­contained nature of paintings themselves. Art doesn’t refer to reality, but only to its own as an artificial construct. Gazing at Picasso’s Still Life with a Bottle of Rum (1911) or Violin and Grapes (1912), one is aware of the painting’s presence as a painting—a formal composition as opposed to a placeholder for something else. At the same time, this flaunting of artifice conceals a mimetic interest. In a poetic sense, cubist art evokes reality more faithfully than its naturalistic counterpart, since it pays homage to optical illusions and a multi­ perspective ideal. An object’s vari­ous angles overlie one another (although an exhaustive compilation would be impossible) across a carefully manipulated grid. These takes include surfaces hidden from view when one looks at a subject from a fixed vantage point, surfaces apprehended over time (thus, the suggestion of movement), and, more inwardly, those sig-



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nifications an object bears for us. In this way cubism unsettles past crafting and viewing practices to re-­create our sensory collision with the world. The familiar appears radically alien as a result. So, too, does Stein attri­ bute a hyper-­realistic dimension to her nonnarrative style. In the essay “Poetry and Grammar” (1935), she writes, “For me the problem of poetry was and it began with Tender Buttons to constantly realize the thing anything so that I could recreate that thing. [. . .] The noun must be replaced not by inner balance but by the thing in itself and that will eventually lead to everything.”16 Art should access and recount the object-­world as transparently as possible. But it isn’t just this multitudinous quality that has enshrined Stein’s and Picasso’s cubist pieces as avant-­garde staples. It is also, and more fundamentally, their formal modes themselves. Beyond structuring techniques (simultaneity), one speaks of particular styles here. Recognizable slices of life aren’t rehashed into new wholes, as if conventional images could be exhumed once some perspectives or word groups were eliminated and unscrambled. Picasso’s shapes, lines, color palette, and brushstrokes would render his subjects optically unfamiliar even if they were somehow miraculously adapted into a classically three-­dimensional format. More of­ten than not, his objects cannot be reconstituted without necessitating new paintings altogether, their links to typical iconology being so attenuated. While the words “Ma Jolie” and a treble clef can be discerned in it, Picasso’s Ma Jolie (1911–12) fails to deliver a woman’s stable outline. Stein’s word-­combinations more tenaciously resist reordering efforts. Aside from isolated extracts—“see a fine substance strangely,”17 “Act so that there is no use in a centre”18—Tender Buttons disorients readers through its refusal to yield coherent clauses. Ordinary syntax and contextual relations between agents, actions, settings, and characteristics have eroded to the extent that the entire poem assumes a riddling, nonsensical air. Despite prepositions, conjunctions, auxiliaries, and main verbs circulating for the most part, Stein’s run-­ons, fragments, illogical syllogisms, lists, and sound play (“A type oh oh new new not no not knealer knealer”19) mystify an otherwise age-­old subject: the household. Stein’s and Picasso’s fractured forms aren’t severed from cultural traditions and biographical circumstances, yet these contexts lose much sway when modernists close in on the world as if they’d never seen it before. Insofar as they defamiliarize the language by which the everyday world finds form, Stein and Picasso hold Cézanne’s postimpressionist tradition as a vital influence. Cézanne, after all, was one of the first to veer away from regular portraiture’s stereography. Stein overtly acknowledges her interest

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in Cézanne’s perspectival pantheism in a 1946 interview with William S. Sutton: “Cézanne conceived the idea that in composition one thing was as important as another thing. Each part is as important as the whole, and that impressed me enormously.”20 What she presumably refers to is how, in paintings such as Portrait of a Peasant (1905–06), Cézanne downplays spatial hierarchies by relatively evenly distributing colors or juxtaposing warm and cool tones rather than adopting typical chiaroscuro effects. The sof­tening between objects, human fig­ures included, accompanies the sof­ tening between foreground and background, with the artist deemphasizing marked lines. Inanimate objects consequently become as visually interesting as animate objects. Animate objects can be observed as clinically as if they were inanimate objects.21 As Cézanne’s correspondence reveals, such painterly gestures aim to recall nature’s flickering colors and movement as spontaneously as possible.22 Evidenced in his preoccupation with translating the play of light across the retina, Cézanne was expanding the impressionist quest to provide unmediated optical sensations. Living in an intellectual climate informed by Ruskin’s “innocent eye” and Edmond and Jules de Goncourt’s “optique intellectuelle,”23 impressionist artists struggled to convey the fleeting quality of light moving across a space and its inhabitants. To that end, they painted swiftly, relying on broad, open brushstrokes. They painted, even, as though they had never before witnessed light transfiguring a landscape, practicing Ruskin’s and the Goncourts’ art of detached contemplation. By this I mean the push to absorb nature without prejudices. While praising his close friend William Turner in The Elements of Drawing (1857), Ruskin makes the extravagant claim that the “whole technical power of painting depends on our recovery of what may be called the innocence of the eye [. . .] a sort of childish perception of these flat stains of colour, merely as such, without consciousness of what they signify—as a blind man would see them if suddenly gifted with sight.”24 Like Ruskin, the Goncourt brothers infused the act of seeing with wonder. Their ideal artist renders the world into an aesthetic phenomenon without sentimentality and reliance on dull traditions. In the visual arts, this project means abandoning straight lines in painting, since, as the brothers said, “There is no straight line in Nature. It is a human invention.”25 In the theater, it means appreciating one’s real-­ life models from a distance, as an anecdote of an actress coolly studying her dying woman servant illustrates: “Rachel went downstairs in tears and genuinely upset; but before a quarter of an hour had passed, the artiste was completely absorbed in studying the death-­agony of the unfortunate woman, who had become a stranger for her, a subject.”26



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If the impressionists painted in an intellectual climate informed by the Goncourts, the Goncourts were no less susceptible to impressionist influence. The duo’s literary ideas very much assume an impressionistic sheen, despite being formally aligned with Zola’s naturalism.27 Throughout their journals, one can trace an impressionist aesthetic at work, the concentration in immediate experiential reality. “In a word, our ambition has been to show changing humanity in its momentary reality,”28 the pair declare in their preface. “Our constant endeavour to be true to life in the recording of every still-­warm recollection, hastily set down on paper and not always re-­ read,” intends to transmit “the sharpness of our sensations.”29 Whether on the page or on canvas, hurrying to most authentically catch an atmosphere before it fades away defines the impressionist mind-­set.30 Their devotion to what they call “exact impressions”31 ties the Goncourts to the impressionists, the impressionists to Cézanne,32 Cézanne to Picasso, and Picasso back to Stein. Stein herself connects Cézanne with Picasso’s cubism through an analogy between the latter and the First World War: “Really, the composition of this war, 1914–1918, was not the composition of all previous wars, the composition was not a composition in which there was one man in the center surrounded by a lot of other men but a composition that had neither a beginning nor an end, a composition of which one corner was as important as another corner, in fact the composition of cubism.”33 By describing an allegedly “cubist” war in Cézannesque terms (the “one thing was as important as another thing” mentioned in Stein’s 1946 interview), Stein affirms Cézanne’s meaningfulness for Picasso. At the root of Picasso’s compositional breakthroughs, Stein insinuates, lies Cézanne’s fresh look outward into the world, his will “to free our minds” in the “study [of ] beautiful nature,”34 “to render the image of what we see, in forgetting everything that appeared before us.”35 Over the course of his career, in depreciating classical value gradation, an evenly blended color palette, intricate detailing, fixed contours, and complicated geometric forms, Cézanne took Ruskin’s advice to new heights in canvases from The Boy in the Red Vest (1888–90), Bibémus Quarry (1895), and The Grounds of the Château-­Noir (1900–1904) all the way to The Large Bathers (1906). Like father, like children: in Picasso, Stein delivers a story of one of Cézanne’s heirs, Picasso, that also becomes her own. Both he and she adopt a more immediately literal, and, ergo, alien-­seeming attention toward life. She cites one of Picasso’s phenomenological methods as an example, where he divides the visual field, zooming in to one feature at a time (on canvas, again, such features can be overlaid or otherwise manipulated, given Picasso’s disinterest in coordinating features into seemly wholes): “Really most

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of the time one sees only a feature of a person with whom one is, the other features are covered by a hat, by the light, by clothes for sport and everybody is accustomed to complete the whole entirely from their knowledge, but Picasso when he saw an eye, the other one did not exist for him and only the one he saw did exist for him and as a painter and particularly as a Spanish painter, he was right, one sees what one sees, the rest is a reconstruction from memory.”36 “I was alone at this time in understanding him,” Stein continues on the next page, “perhaps because I was expressing the same thing in literature.”37 The cubist Stein and Picasso exaggerate the strangeness of things as they are distilled from their visual panorama and concomitant whirlwind of associations.38 Like Picasso, Stein asserts, she seizes what she calls “another reality” buried beneath “habits, schools, daily life, reason, necessities of daily life, indolence.”39 For her, both invoke the poetic essence of spontaneous perception before common sense intervenes. Stein believes Picasso’s “tomatoe [sic] was not everybody’s tomatoe,” since “his effort was not to express in his way the things seen as ­every one sees them, but to express the thing as he was seeing it.”40 He draws not the fruit we typically purchase at grocery stores, eat in salads, place in bowls, dry in the sun, or squeeze into ketchup. Picasso’s tomatoes go beyond these familiar correlations. Much in the same way, Stein’s “tender buttons” are hardly the buttons we fasten every day.

i On Stein’s behalf today, the poet Lyn Hejinian asks, “Do the words in which we speak of a thing capture our perception, our thought of it?”41 One step further: can we perceive something without preconceptions? Working backward from the sec­ond question to the first, a writer cannot describe objects and ideas without reference to established vocabularies. The logic surrounding perception prevents any such creative method: a lifetime of ingrained attitudes toward things cannot be perfectly purged, especially when language (once more, a medium laced with cultural biases) encapsulates them. Even at its most immediate, the human gaze remains mediated by circumstances—a place, time, temperament, and so on. A view is always a view from somewhere. Too many years of living, talking, reading, listening, using things, and relating to our surroundings work against us. The inhumanly unprejudiced look that Ruskin and Stein imagine remains the stuff of myth. To perceive is an interpretative activity.42 Painting perceptual data compounds this personal element. As the German impressionist Max Leibermann was all too aware, art never transcribes reality, only abstracts it to varying degrees. In “Ein Credo” (1922),



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he queries, “But isn’t every painting, as soon as it is a work of art, a painting of the imagination?”43 Although the credo ends with a conservative appeal against abstract expressionism and other movements that “distort the origi­ nal image of nature to the point of unrecognizability,”44 its broader point endures. For all their enthusiasm for life’s immediacy, even the G ­ on­courts assumed that the eye requires instruction to be “innocent” in a certain way. “Beauty is what untrained eyes consider abominable,”45 they contend in 1859. Around twenty years later, Edmond reasserts, “The real connoisseurs in art are those who make people accept as beautiful something every­body used to consider ugly, by revealing and resuscitating the beauty in it.”46 While practicing their craft, the duo welcomed certain artifices, hesitant to overshare private acts in the theater or write without a “hallmark” style.47 Even Cézanne approached the innocent eye as an ideal. Throughout his letters, art remains a vehicle for in­di­vidual expression, notwithstanding the artist’s ideological commitment to pure optical reconstructions. To Louis Aurenche, Cézanne counsels, “For if a strong feeling for nature [. . .] is the necessary basis for any artistic concept, and upon which rest the grandeur and beauty of future work, a knowledge of the means of expressing our emotion is no less essential.”48 Similarly, to Émile Bernard, one of his earliest and in many ways misguided proponents,49 Cézanne urges, “We must seek to express ourselves according to our personal temperaments.”50 More broadly still, whether painting, looking at paintings, writing, or reading, our preconceptions come into play. Even the impressionists took for granted that their audience would, as Gombrich takes pains to reiterate, “read across brushstrokes”51 to fathom the image at hand, no matter how hazy or unfinished-­looking. Impressionist art appeals to the viewer’s criti­ cal reflexes. The same goes for Stein, who challenges readers to read her texts within and against an evolving exegetical tradition. But let us turn back to Hejinian’s origi­nal question. A text would be hard-­pressed to provide a photographic imprint of an individual’s mind at a given instant, verbal art being discursive by nature (although the extent to which it is so can be debated). (Truth be told, even photographs aestheticize reality by discriminating between subjects and manipulating their appearances, so this analogy somewhat misleads.52) Literature necessarily transmutes what is apprehended. A text never exists as a carbon copy of any perceptual process. A kind of internal screening precedes the act of writing. The moment one decides to “photocopy” one’s thoughts, one approaches the world in literary terms, which is to say in terms of select phenomena recorded in sequence. Sensory impressions, feelings, and cogitations well up simultaneously, yet the writer records them one at a

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time on paper—letters forming words, words forming lines, lines filling pages, all read left to right, top-­down, front to back. The written word restructures our attention in a distinct way. A text only offers a textual interpretation of the mind in motion. Words furnish a portion of our experiential awareness of the world, not all of it. To return to the photocopier allusion, a machine can photocopy only what is already formatted for it: appropriately marked pages. Hans-­Georg Gadamer once declared, “Language is not one of the means by which consciousness is mediated with the world. Rather, in all our knowl­ edge of ourselves and in all knowledge of the world, we are always already encompassed by the language that is our own.”53 It would be more accurate to say, however, that (slowly cultivated from that primordial past whence the first humans awakened to themselves) language frames the way we see the world, yet the world loses something of its fullness when reconstituted in language. To verbalize is to step back from the world. Thus, many of Ariane Mildenberg’s phenomenological statements on Stein’s art—­“Woolf, Stein and Stevens [. . .] seek to expose the world in its pre-­givenness and bring to light a pre-­conceptual, unmediated experience of this world”54 or “By virtue of its grotesque word combinations, the project of Tender But­ tons attempts to capture primordial experience prior to the structures of grammar and reason, prior to our acts of naming”55—dwell on the poetic nature of Stein’s quest, with an emphasis on design, not execution. Stein’s word portraits only partially suspend language rules, only partially wrench us away from familiar contexts. To feign otherwise is naivete or mysticism. Stein’s fiction originates in the fiction that fiction can actualize an epistemological totality. Not only can art flawlessly reproduce the workings of consciousness, then, but consciousness itself can engulf objects from a clean slate. This Ruskinian stance determines true objectivity for Stein. Stein’s literary attempt to transcend literature is part of a longer theoretical tradition that originates in classical art (Pygmalion’s love story being a quintessential example), gathers momentum in impressionism, and culminates in modernism—the myth of anti-­art. Its enduring legacy, paradoxically, remains art’s heightened (by now, near paranoid) self-­awareness of its formal scope. On paper the failure to display things in themselves— no place available for their wordless, palpable reality to reside—has rendered literature more vividly a thing in itself. Rather than rushing to keep pace with events happening to someone somewhere else in a story, one spends more time reading, sounding words out, and testing their emotional charges. Literature’s referential function has, in Stein, grown ever more subtle, shifting, attenuated, inward. By fragmenting this function to



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a then-­unanticipated degree, no other writer has so formidably renewed the text’s phenomenological properties. The visual, phonetic, and imaginative experience of reading becomes a marvelously bizarre affair.

i In The Making of a Modernist: Gertrude Stein from Three Lives to Tender Buttons (1984), Jayne L. Walker curiously draws back from Stein’s ambivalence toward Ruskin’s logical fallacy (absolute ocular innocence). I’m not sure, as Walker appears to be, that Stein fully acknowledges the aesthetic impossibility she sets up for herself: to re-­create unmediated perceptual experience on the page. The few Tender Buttons passages and authorial statements that Walker musters—most memorably: “It was not solely the realism of the characters but the realism of the composition which was the important thing, the realism of the composition of my thoughts”56 and “Practice the sign that means that really means a necessary betrayal”57— can all too easily be countered by other lines pulled from other places. Ruskin’s ghost haunts Stein still. “That is the problem—to write things as they are, not as they seem. Our aim must be not to explain things, but to write the thing itself, and thereby in itself be self explanatory,” Stein herself admits in a 1935 lecture.58 She rearticulates this idea in “Portraits and Repetition”: “I began again not to let the looking be predominating not to have the listening and talking be predominating but to once more denude all this of anything in order to get back to the essence of the thing contained within itself.”59 Stein speaks of essences over appearances, objectivity’s triumph over the subjective. A faint whiff of sophism enters— the unspoken assumption that language embodies things without reference to their prior significations for readers. Most urgently addressing art’s mimetic function, Stein’s essay ­“Pictures” teems with conflicting impulses: art as art, art as transparently mirroring nature. (“Pictures” is, not incidentally, a piece that Walker omits from her book.) When Stein affirms art as art, she writes, “Anything once it is made has its own existence and it is because of that that anything holds somebody’s attention. The question always is about that anything, how much vitality has it and do you happen to like to look at it.”60 An oil painting of the Battle of Waterloo, say, holds our attention by the weight of its existence as an oil painting. It cannot conjure the actual battle’s three-­dimensional reality, no matter how lifelike its surface. Stein is neither provincial nor delusional enough to make such grandiose claims: “There it all was the things to see but there was no air it just was an oil painting. I remember standing on the little platform in the center and almost consciously know-

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ing there was no air. [. . .] It just was an oil painting and it had a life of its own and it was a scene as an oil painting sees it and it was a real thing which looked like something I had seen but it had nothing to do with that something that I knew because the feeling was not at all that not at all the feeling which I had when I saw anything that was really what the oil painting showed. It the oil painting showed it as an oil painting. That is what an oil painting is.”61 Other paintings, however, elicit mixed emotions. At times, we lose sense of Stein’s meaning altogether or wonder whether she’s contradicting herself. An oil painting lives “in and for itself,”62 yet when it captures the world too perfectly, the author wavers. Cazin’s wheat fields “discourage” Stein (“One does not like to be mixed in one’s mind as to which looks most like something at which one is looking the thing or the painting”63), Shilling’s Ameri­can landscapes “bother” her for blurring “the thing seen” with “the thing painted,”64 and Botticellis are so realistic as to appear “artificial.”65 But how can artifice appear more artificial by recourse to the real? Stein explains, “I used to walk in the country and then I concluded that the Botticellis being really so like the flowers in the country they were not the pictures before which one could sleep, they were to my feeling, being that they looked so like the flowers in the country, they were artificial. You know what I mean artificial flowers. And I literally mean just that.”66 Once we get past Stein’s signature abstruseness, I take it she means that the artwork loses its integrity as art if it tries too hard to be lifelike. Velásquez and Courbet disturb Stein to no end for that reason. “The Velasquez bothered me as I say,” Stein confesses, “because like the Cazins of my youth they were too real and yet they were not real enough to be real and not unreal enough to be unreal.”67 Courbet’s realism similarly induces anxiety for “detracting from the reality of the oil painting as oil painting.”68 Courbet’s colors so vividly evoke nature that Stein almost mistakes “the Courbets not being an oil painting but being a piece of the country in miniature as seen in a diminishing glass.”69 One imagines she would’ve been aggravated by the spirit animating René Magritte’s The ­Human Condition (1933) for the same cause. Tensions between artistic representation and reality escalate as “Pictures” continues. The root issue remains constant: what is the f­unction and capacity of art? To gesture beyond itself, toward itself, or all the above? Stein’s growing faith that “it made no difference what an oil painting painted it always did and should look like an oil painting,”70 and her penchant for Greco and Cézanne—both factors suggest she pursued art that practiced (by default) the third option. Greco “excited” her, because his “oil painting was pure it neither moved nor was still nor was it real.”71 Cézanne’s objects “were so entirely these things that they were not an oil painting and



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yet that is just what the Cezannes [sic] were they were an oil painting.”72 But Stein makes such breakthroughs only to retract them. After discuss­ ing Rosenthal, Millet, Hayden, Whistler, Zorn, Méryon, Japanese prints, Cazin, Daubigny, Rousseau, Corot, Shilling, Tintoretto, Giotto, Castagna, Botticelli, Mantegna, Rubens, Titian, Velásquez, Greco, Courbet, David, Scheffer, Greuze, Cézanne, Matisse, Picasso, Leonardo, and Seurat, Stein shockingly states, “I realized as I had already found out very of­ten that there is a relation between anything that is painted and the painting of it. And gradually I realized as I had found very of­ten that that relation was so to speak nobody’s business.”73 Walker believes that, like Cézanne whose “surface designs were conceived in an effort to create a perfect match between the concrete signifiers of painting and the empirical data of perception,”74 Stein “clearly acknowledges that her commitment to the reality of immediate experience was always matched by—if not mastered by—her intense awareness of the separate but equal reality of language.”75 One of Stein’s 1940 letters to Robert Bartlett Haas reinforces Walker’s reading by positing, to quote Stein directly, “the relation of Description to Imagination”76 as one of interchangeability. “There is no real separation of course not, even in dreams of course not,” Stein writes of the pair.77 Mediated by subjectivity, description involves some level of the imagination. The imagination describes its chosen objects. But “Pictures” counters such reciprocal logic, stranding us in a strange place, somewhere between empirical realism and an excessively ideal phenomenology. Three years later, the signifier-­signified debate finds new form in Pi­ casso, which pits the visual against the emotive, the literal against the abstract, in describing the artist’s twentieth-­century innovations. Half of the time, Stein recounts a Picasso who heroically adopts Ruskin’s innocent eye. “Without the aid of association or emotion,”78 Picasso documents what he sees in the most literal sense—distorted proportions, blurred margins, and all. By doing so, he reminds Stein of an infant coming to terms with the visible world: “A child sees the face of its mother, it sees it in a completely different way than other people see it, I am not speaking of the spirit of the mother, but of the features and the whole face, the child sees it from very near, it is a large face for the eyes of a small one, it is certain the child for a little while only sees a part of the face of its mother, it knows one feature and not another, one side and not the other, and in his way Picasso knows faces as a child knows them and the head and the body. He was then commencing to try to express this consciousness.”79 Drawing exactly what one sees at a given moment gives rise to a peculiar tableaux, one lacking nicely rounded-­out fig­ures and panoramas. Picasso’s cubism takes after Con­ stable’s impressionism and Cézanne’s postimpressionism through such

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dissociative gestures, although Stein, given to hyperbole here, never articulates the matter thus. A cubism that bothers only with “visible things,”80 “not things felt, not things remembered not established in relations,”81 swings into expressionism, however, when Stein construes Picasso as one “who saw a reality that was not the vision of the nineteenth century, which was not a thing seen but felt, which was a thing that was not based upon nature but opposed to nature.”82 Such reversals happen swiftly without warning. From transcribing nature, unnatural forms come to the fore, as Stein situates the cubist imagination in a lessened “faith in what the eyes were seeing” as well as “need that a picture exist in its frame.”83 Cubism now circulates for all intents and purposes as a variant of Kandinskean abstraction, taking in stride science’s optically unperceivable discoveries and art’s increasingly lifelike achievements. It pushes to unearth something novel, something less obsessed with disclosing material reality—a philosophically and his­tori­cally worn-­out venture, Stein intimates. Unlike Seurat, Courbet, Matisse, and their contemporaries, Picasso abandoned mere retinal sensations, according to Stein, for “things expressed.”84 A visual visionary morphs into a spiritual one. But why an art of interiors trumps that of exteriors, especially when all art invokes both, goes unanswered.

i Stein extends the internally unstable tradition of pure retinal sensations promoted by Poussin, Berke­ley, Chardin, Ruskin, Courbet, Manet, Constable, and Cézanne.85 (Even the realists and naturalists dreamt of recovering things in themselves. Courbet, for one, declares in an open letter to students: “Imagination in art consists in knowing how to find the most complete expression of an existing thing, but never in inventing or creat­ ing that thing itself.”86) While literature remains mediated by culture— Stein herself even lets slip, “The creator in the arts is like all the rest of the people living he is sensitive to the changes in the way of living and his art is inevitably influenced by the way each generation is living”87—she cannot resist rhetorically inflating the age-­old quest to revitalize reality for the world-­weary. Treating the mind as a mechanical device that records phenomenological data from a clean slate becomes a strategy by which Stein charges “the earth” with a sensuous “splendor that it never has had.”88 Art bleeds into science, but science, Stein forgets, doesn’t escape its subjective origins either. A scientific study reveals just as much about its author as the subject in question.

3

On Style

W

ithout comparing Stein’s style with that of her surrealist contemporaries across the decades, it becomes difficult to make the claim that one can read her as a surrealist at all. The act of clarifying her stylistic affinities and dissimilarities with notable surrealists over time pinpoints in which sense Stein’s WWII pieces can be taken as surrealist per se. For Stein in her twilight years was both more and less surrealist than Breton ever was. She grew less enamored with improvisational writing, a surrealist staple she always practiced differently for different reasons. And as her wartime experiences predominantly assumed the narrative format distinguishing the majority of surrealist literature, replete with its vaunted motifs, Stein uniquely internalized the violence she witnessed everywhere around her. Her own uncertainties regarding human intimacy intensified at the same time. Violence and intimacy become familial concepts in her last works, the intimacy of violence and the violence permeating certain intimate encounters ever more urgently courting the author’s attention. With the aim of contextualizing Stein’s formal and thematic gestures detailed in the last two chapters, this chapter contrasts Stein’s and surrealism’s most experimental styles, surveying a number of representative surrealist excerpts before delving into Stein’s own. Given the variety of surrealist automatic experiments available, the claim that surrealism hardly musters a stir in the formal arena begs further quali­ fi­ca­tions for some. Yet a closer look reveals subtle distinctions between the quintessential surrealist’s obscurities and Stein’s own. More than ­Desnos’s apho­ristic utterances, Tzara’s Dadaist jingles come closest, perhaps, to Stein’s gibberish. But even then, Tzara’s high poetic diction and muscu­lar sensuality affiliate him more intimately with the classical literary pantheon. Like Stein’s The Making of Ameri­cans or Matisse Picasso and Gertrude Stein (composed 1909–12), Tzara’s “The Second Celestial Adventure of Mr. Antipyrine” (1917) features sections peppered with aggressively repetitive language. He writes “decidedly” nine times in a row,1 then churns out s­ tanzas to the tune of “Mr. Saturn” a few pages later:

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MR. SATURN return to the innermost center look for the innermost center on the center there is a center and on the center there is a center and on the center there is another center and on each center there is another center (encore) and on each center there is a center on each center there is a center.2

In this mode Stein would probably have excised the commands, metacommentary (the “encore” that both signals another refrain and the presence of an appreciative audience), and generous line breaks, where each independent clause earns its own row. Instead, one imagines she would opt for the dense, winding sentences running through Two: Gertrude Stein and Her Brother (1910–12). A representative snippet—“In saying all he was saying he was saying all that was said when he was saying all that was said and in saying all that was said he was saying what he was saying”3—­already emanates a strikingly different feel from Tzara’s verbal rings around Saturn. Stein’s prose feels more viscous, almost claustrophobic. Writing everything in an ongoing torrent instead of visually spacing out her lines generates a more immersive reading experience. There is no space to rest and catch one’s breath. One simply wades through the stream of seemingly endless present participles. While Tzara’s objects float in a haze, he maintains a more coherent narrative voice than Stein ever does: male, absorbed with his own virility, and a self-­proclaimed Dadaist who of­ten meets the world with scorn (“you are all idiots / cataplasms / with the alcohol of sterile sleep / bandages / and virgin / idiots”4), sometimes a melancholically oscillating desire. Unlike Stein, this personality—in this case, “Mr. Antipyrine”—plays with typefaces, margins, spacing, and textual alignment. Yet Stein would never deploy such pseudoscientifically highfalutin language as “latent sub-­matinal crispation”5 or “Anytipyrine in his pajamas drops the gazometric word he had been keeping in the fingertips of his woolly brain.”6 Nor would she weave in the sexually explicit “saturated ostrich genitalia,”7 “rape the envelopes,”8 “testicular soap,”9 “spermatozoid ballet,”10 “bicephalic blood,”11 and “I’ll come back some time as your urine.”12 They would feel heavy-­ handed for her. Anything on the nose defeats her quest to deconstruct predictable associative leaps. Stein enjoyed partaking in the age-­old game responsible for so much of literary innovation: euphemisms. Plus, Tzara’s



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figurative sound bites—“from her mouth spittle glides like hanging lanterns,”13 “our love hangs in shreds like a putrid glacier,”14 “A beard of cool androgynous stalactites hung all about the pelvis and the lever of his amorous intensity,”15 “look at the pendulum becoming a tongue”16—never destabilize the logic of symbols as such. Tzara expresses none of Stein’s discomfort regarding the formulas A is B, A is like B. He refits this framework with new symbols rather than abandoning it altogether. And the symbols themselves make sense, albeit in a tenuous fashion. Spittle may not glide, yet it can dribble in the same direction a lantern hangs: downward. Turbulent love is frequently likened to a tattered fabric. A beard hanging by the pelvic region translates into pubic hair. Tongues, whether in the act of dining or cunnilingus, can flit back and forth like a pendulum. Tzara’s sexual allusions depend on sexual terminology, even if he enjoys using unlikely word-­mates. It is Tzara who brings together rape and envelopes, testes and soap, sperm and ballet, a torn cloth and glaciers, ice and vegetable decay, hair and rock, rocks and hermaphroditism. As with Tzara, a quick skim over the most fragmentary excerpts belonging to Hugnet, Desnos, Breton, or Soupault confirms that what similarities they share with the abstract Stein remain superficial. For new images, not a new language for imagery, are surrealism’s crowning triumph. Within an atmosphere of sexual opulence, one at times punctuated by vague forebodings of violence, fresh metaphors and analogies rise to the surface of a grammatically stable matrix. See Hugnet’s “Poem” below: The chrysalis says she is the fern’s perfection, chance is being’s will, the hatchway is a grain of salt on a frigate’s sail, the doors are pieces of shadow, the drawers are at play, the triangles are earthen, indolence is reddish, the lama’s nose is a window, good-­morning chases a fly on to the ceiling, the walls are the halt of the ultramarine and the roof is a pump, your face does not exist, my love is well polished, the sea interrogates its beaches secretly, living is not following a mirror’s movements as best one can, the winged ant is an ear, tears are the beggars who roll to the bottom of ponds, a room is the bother of leaving it, entering it is to allow oneself everything, I wish you were chilly,

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desolation is a bunch of papers, the wind is a hand, the hand a raspberry, when the sea comes up, chance threads a needle, the shine of your fingernails is echoed by the apples, looking is not for much more than a pillow-­case, habit is the eye and speaking is black, if I ask myself questions I dress in beetle, reason is the same as fear: the little green spot that shakes about in the red sea, blood is a sculpture, a book or the wherewithal to die, the addressee of a letter is an island-­shaped stain, your hair is an ant-­hill, a medlar-­tree before a cheval-­glass, presence and solitude are two beans in a black room, two beans facing one another, to give shade one turns on the same switch that immortalises the last cigarette of a man condemned to death and there you have the beheading of human justice, sleeping is a word and oracle a mania; egg, awakened dreamer, neither humility nor vanity is my strong point, the tree is a dandyism, a tower goes down the river, Barbary fig, you are my only pride, I am only pride before you, the images are not sufficiently distant, the giraffe is the year’s longest eyelash, one must renounce all commentary, unlearn all that was learnt and live only in the incredible in order to live.17

This idiom is compact, almost entirely consisting of simple, present-­tense sentences in the passive voice. Commas rather than full stops distinguish clauses. Lowercase capitalization dominates in accordance. The odd subordinate phrase and isolated noun get smuggled in, but “Poem” makes its poetry from paratactic constructions floating in a narrative vacuum. Mismatched subjects and predicates absorb Hugnet’s attention. Inanimate ob­jects and abstractions morph into others or commit actions that are arbitrary or impossible. Noses are (like) windows; ants, ears; giraffes, eyelashes; bloods, sculptures; hairs, anthills; trees, dandyisms; desolations,



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papers; tears, beggars. The sea even turns sentient in Hugnet’s fluid-­filled erotic dreams, able to interrogate its own beaches. On that note, what does it mean for a body of water to “interrogate” its own beaches “secretly” any­ way? To send heavy waves against the shore during mild weather or wash through all the nooks hidden from plain sight? Such logistical questions recur with a vengeance through­out surrealist writing. Less stark and visually pared down on the page, Breton and Soupault’s Magnetic Fields (1920), a collection of their adapted automatic writing experiments, similarly preserves clausal structures even as it glories in free associations. Taking the last paragraph of their chapter “Eclipses”— Some amusing fire-­damp jobs are in preparation while, heads lowered, the smart set are leaving on a journey to the centre of the earth. They have been told about buried suns. The large pieces of spaces thus created go off as fast as possible towards the pole. The white bears’ watch indicates the hour of the ball. The stupid rigging instruments of the air, before arriving, form monkeys that are quick to understand that they’ve been made fun of. They loosen their tails of tempered steel. Their lucky star is the eye, disgusted at this height, of the women they abducted. The grotto is cool and creates the feeling that one should clear off; water is calling us, it is red and the smile is stronger than the crevices which run up and down your house like plants, O day magnificent and gentle as this extraordinary little brain. The sea that we love cannot bear men as skinny as we are. Elephants with women’s heads and flying lions are required. The cage is open and the hotel closed for the sec­ond time, whew, it’s hot! In place of the ring-­ master you notice a rather beautiful lioness who scrawls her tamer on the sand and leans over to lick him from time to time. The large phosphorescent marshes have pleasant dreams and the crocodiles take back the suitcase made of their skins. One’s career is forgotten in the foreman’s arms. That’s when the goods-­truck’s coarse coal-­dust that excuses everything makes an intervention. The little school children who see that have forgotten their hands in the herbal. Like you, they will go to sleep tonight in the breath of this optical bouquet which is a fond misuse18

—the same impulse to commonsensically dissolve common sense in the nonsensical can be gleaned. Breton and Soupault favor paragraphs containing slightly longer compound sentences, yet no clause runs over two lines. Like Hugnet, the pair favor comma splices, fiddling with back­stories (there are none), determinate nouns, and a subtly literary diction (e.g., “phosphorescent,” “indicates,” “abducted,” “grotto,” “crevices,” “coarse,” “O day”). A

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schoolboy’s devotion to language’s rudiments balances out what inventiveness drives the punning “buried suns” or “they will go to sleep tonight in the breath of this optical bouquet which is a fond misuse.” The surrealists may tinker with logical fallacies, but they refrain from courting a more primal befuddlement from readers. In the chapter “Barriers,” Breton and Soupault even over-­helpfully demarcate conversational snippets and apho­ risms with dashes and paragraph breaks: —I prefer those handsome shops in which the cashier reigns from an elevated desk. One can scarcely believe one’s eyes. But since you wish to pass by on the opposite pavement, we shall embarrass you less. —The return to basic principles presumes a soul of the best quality, which we do not possess. That takes place only in the presence of police officers.19

Try as they might, and for all their incendiary cries against literary institutions, they could not bring themselves to give up, as Stein did, the pillar of their medium: the simple clause. France’s twentieth-­century sons of the revolutionary remained dutiful grammarians to the end. As for Crevel, the surrealist closest to Stein’s heart, while a confessional memoirist willing to divulge secrets in a way Stein never would (one would be hard-­pressed to find “dick, a philanthropic corkscrew,”20 “male complacency wants whores to fuck,”21 “I fuck you and you suck me,”22 the genital “trinity,”23 “prostatic secretion,”24 and “horse’s penis out of its sheath”25 anywhere in Stein’s lexicon), his alliterative repetitions unexpectedly bear Stein’s imprint. In My Body and I, despite its plumbing the depths of a sexualized interiority foreign to Stein’s sensibility, the prose weaves in Stein­ian clips such as “Spontaneously spontaneous,”26 “A lily better dressed than Solomon in all his glory, among so many similar plants, so pride can finally emerge today. A lily better dressed than Solomon in all his glory,”27 and “Memory, mimosa. Memory mimosa [. . .] Memory, mimosa, memory, mimosa.”28 His thoughts, too, drift here and there without much s­ tructure. Crevel rambles from memory to memory—a girl whom Crevel remembers passing on the street as a thirteen-­year-­old to circus trapeze artists he lustfully sights only three years before his present. Crevel’s letters to Stein likewise pay homage to her circular style: “I write like a pig. / Pig is a pig. / Crevel is Crevel,”29 “week is a week is a week is a week.”30 He of­ ten endearingly plays off of Stein’s rose motif. In 1927, for instance, he writes Stein a little poem:



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Young is young is young is young just like rose is a rose is a rose is a rose But René Crevel is not young is not rose Now René is René is René poor is poor is poor boy is boy is boy René Crevel is the friend (it’s true) of Miss Stein of Miss Touclas



. . . . . . . . .



Expecting, at bed



Inspiration

I have knickerbockers (atchoum) Look at me in the mountains cold morning elegance



dreaming31

In another letter sent that same year, Crevel scribbles, “Solitude is solitude is solitude / but not a Rose alas.”32 A year later, he describes himself to Stein as “a rose of purety [sic].”33 Stein’s rose potentially grips his imagination for its associations with the French saying “C’est la vie,” some of the few words that the ill such as himself viscerally live out. Desnos both is and isn’t like his peers in this context. Initially one of the most gifted practitioners of psychography (during Breton’s numerous séances organized around the early 1920s, his scribbling fits while allegedly asleep captivated audiences), Desnos rarely strays from compressed clausal constructions. In Rrose Sélavy, his collection of trance-­induced ­apho­risms inspired by Duchamp’s alter ego, words foreign to Stein’s lexicon can be spotted (because too overtly carnal, cerebral, or both): “wombs,”34 ­“bosom,”35

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“astral quadrant,” “canoodling of shoddy wenches,”37 “verrucas of the breast,”38 “Seized with reckless love, the Alpine parson spreads his frocks to the rocks to ease his loins,”39 “People of Sodom, fear the fire of heaven, prefer the fever of the rear,”40 “Maladies issue from every orifice of cadavers’ palaces,”41 “phthisical,”42 “females pick and scratch at sores,”43 “phallus,”44 “For the fleshly calèche it’s a long lane, will the carnal car go far,”45 “belly of flesh,”46 “Desnos does not pale as he deals with desires on his pole,”47 and “buttocks.”48 Nor does Stein share Desnos’s penchant for goddesses or Greco-­Roman myth in general. (Desnos’s Duchampian mouthpiece cannot help blurting out Homeric allusions to the tune of: “O T ­ elemachus, tell me cameos.”49) The mythical baggage that high modernism was so fond of is virtually absent in Stein’s oeuvre. Rrose Sélavy’s faintly angst-­ridden Catholic atmosphere (there are the usual mentions of abbesses, Jesus, lust, and blood) likewise finds no easy parallel in Stein’s fiction. At the same time, Desnos enjoys punning and patterning sounds as much as Stein does in that mood. If Stein arranges homophones into nursery rhymes in poems such as “Lifting Belly” (“Big Caesars. / Two Caesars. /Little seize her. / Too”50), Desnos gives us: 36

Oh, my knackered noddle, star-­struck nacreous nodule.51 Pass me my barbary quiver, says the barbaric vizier.52 Nor can Caron con it.53 Rrose Sélavy may don prison’s drab garb, yet her mount ranges on mountain-­ranges.54 Rrose Sélavy passes the palm that lacks the glamour of martyrs to Lakmé the lamb-­herd of Chartres on the Beauce’s flat metal calm, by name beauty.55 Roman persimmons taste to pages as if gnawed in rages by jaws of Moors.56

Desnos is all the more interesting for disavowing automatic writing in his later years. Rrose Sélavy remains one of his most formally challenging pieces, flourishing a style abandoned for either the Sadean romp (think of Corsair Sanglot’s adventures) or lyric confessional. With sultry lines such as “Endlessly the same syllables: Corinth. / And the earth moans in weakness and in fear,”57 his 1944 poem “The Beach” may even remind contemporary audiences of Pablo Neruda. Like Stein, Desnos also became



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drawn to Mother Goose rhymes and fairy tales during the Vichy years. As ­Katharine Conley chronicles in Robert Desnos, Surrealism, and the Marvel­ ous in Everyday Life (2003), Desnos began composing fairy-­tale verses for his friends’ children in the 1930s. While Conley traces how such efforts eventually culminated in his nursery rhyme book Trente chantefables pour enfants sages à chanter sur n’importe quel air (1944), she expresses an equal interest in how Desnos may have been intrigued by the fairy tale genre’s potential to convey grim truths in a roundabout fashion, an evocative quality for those trying to smuggle messages around the Gestapo. Fairy tales also exerted a nationalist appeal in occupied France. When circulating resistance materials could incur deportation or execution, fairy tales provided convenient smokescreens for po­liti­cally subversive tidings, being easy to understand, memorize, and pass on.58 Like Stein and so many other writers living in Hitler’s Europe, Desnos couldn’t help but weave his wartime experiences into his art. Unlike Stein, however, he did not outlive the war itself. The voice whom Breton once pronounced the most authoritative on the unconscious perished in camp Theresienstadt at the age of forty-­four.

i Stein, on her end, relatively rarely used analogies and metaphors. And when she did, they were of­ten so vague as to be meaningless. In “Lifting Belly” she writes at one point, “The wind whistles that means it whistles just like any one. I thought it was a whistle.”59 Skimming further down, we come across: “What kind of noise does it make. Like the man at night. The man that calls out. We hear him.”60 Both analogies fail to describe one thing by way of another because the mediating object is general enough— whistling like anyone, being noisy like some man at night. Stein developed such elliptical statements as part of a broader philosophical repudiation of figurative speech. For Stein vehemently criticizes metaphorical language in her essay “How Writing Is Written” (1935). Words should indicate their referents without the interference of other words, lest writers fall into the habit of perpetuating clichés. As Stein puts it herself, “I didn’t want, when I used one word, to make it carry with it too many associations. I wanted as far as possible to make it exact, as exact as mathematics.”61 But Stein goes a step further in her push against figurative speech by dismantling the grammatical underpinnings of speech altogether. Very little can be figuratively appropriated if few, if any, determinate nouns and independent clauses exist to begin with. The young Stein who wrote “In the Grass (On Spain)” makes a point of luxuriating in polysyndetic coordinations and repetition-­bred semantic satiation:

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Occident all Spain the taste. Milled cautious and plaster and with the heat her trimmed white. [. . .] Be cool inside with a monkey tied, with a monkey tied. Be cool inside the mule. Be cool inside with a surrounded tied, a cast, before, behind again, indeed, many.62 Cup of lather and moan moan stone grown corn and lead white and any way culture is power, Culture is power. Culture.63 Believe, I believe you restruck my cold wet and the dun hit it back choose it set. Come to why, sit in oil save the sos, all the gone sing in a pin save sit it kit, kit all.64 We wide lade the tall tack which squeeze load the no sire and leave more in church maid than rest so to streak. Mow chases in a spoon and tub, big clam, mow places in a boil a piece. No gas bests.65 The reason why a laugh is laughed after is that a shed and a shawl and little onions and keys and keys are after all a dog and a curtain and a little less. Please please please please please. The more the wet is water the more lilies are tubes and red are rice rows. A little scene and a tall fanner and a flower a hair flower and a shoes and a shoes boots and rubbish all this makes raising please tease and a little likeness noises.66 Noble and no noble and no next burr, net in and bee net in and bee next to shown miner. Next to beat bean, next to beat bean next to be blender, next to between, next to between in intend intender. In tender. A laugh in cat, coal hot in. A remembrance of a direct realteration with no bust no buster, no bust here.67

Drawing upon Stein’s vacation months in Mallorca, these selections are incantatory; rhythmically driven; sometimes half-­rhyming; alternating between “I,” “you,” and “we”; missing (or misplacing) conjunctions; and eradi­ cating nearly all circumstantial information. They may even bring to mind jazz scats and nonsense rap. As Jean E. Mills attests in “Gertrude Stein, The Great Great Grand MF of Rap?” (2003), Stein’s percussive syncopations and rhymes could identify her as one of hip-­hop’s origi­nal freestylers. A little under a century before Harlem rapper J. R. Writer pronounces, “I flip the flip for the flip / Call me a flip-­flapper / Then flip-­flop in my



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flip-­flops / With strip-­strippers” (“Jamaican Diplomocracy” [2004]), Stein was already flowing (“In the Grass” incorporates ebonic inflections—the “dun hit it back” and “mow chases” peeking out above) and sampling to the extent that she repeats herself with gusto, mirroring hip-­hop’s enthusiasm for recycling older beats. The cryptic nature of what is repeated remains another matter. William H. Gass, in his introduction to the 1973 Vintage Books edition of Stein’s The Geographical History of America: Or the Relation of Human Nature to the Human Mind (1936), details how the author probably employed a bit of her own shorthand in certain cases. In “All Sunday,” the line “Shawls have hair”68 could have been whittled down from “Shawls have hair on them.” By that logic, “walls have oak leaves”69 may be a minimalist variation of “oak walls have leaves carved on them.” Such inferences regarding Stein’s creative process don’t necessarily apply to all of her compositions, nor does Gass suggest anything of that sort. He merely helps readers grasp to what degree Stein was invested in abandoning the clause. How Stein returns to the narrative genre, that is, reinvests in the question of how the present ties into the past and future cannot be appreciated without realizing the extent to which she resisted storytelling for most of her career. She usually deems “counting” a “mistake,”70 but in works such as “A Diary” (1927), “History or Messages from History” (1930), and The Autobiography of Alice B. Toklas, the writer’s desire for a wider audience becomes more insistent. Along with it, so do her inclinations to entertain soldiers during lean times, to write in a way that memorializes their family histories as well as her own, and to place her faith in prophecies regarding the war’s fortuitous end. The Stein who passionately rejects narrative writing gradually gives way to one more generous-­minded toward it, even if the most profound “message from history” is that nothing changes or any change is happening for the worse. For time’s march assumes a new urgency for an aging author who is increasingly anxious to preserve her legacy. To elaborate on Stein’s “continuous present” itself, the term denotes the literary effect wrought by Stein’s sustained use of present progressives to emulate the immediacy of perceptual experience. In “How Writing Is Written,” Stein recalls how she developed “the continuous present” while writing The Making of Ameri­cans and Three Lives: “I had to use present participles, new constructions of grammar. The grammar-­constructions are correct, but they are changed, in order to get this immediacy.”71 Similarly describing her attempts to evoke the now in which consciousness abides, Stein muses in “The Gradual Making of The Making of Ameri­cans” (1935): “My sentences grew longer and longer, my imaginary dependent clauses

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were constantly being dropped out, I struggled with relations between they them and then, I began with a relation between tenses that sometimes almost seemed to do it.”72 The “continuous present” translates into paragraphs of present participles stripped of context, topical continuity, determinate pronouns, and ordinary conjunctions. The glue holding regular sentences, paragraphs, and chapters together fails to bond. The remainder is rearranged to Stein’s delight, as a glance across The Making of Ameri­ cans reveals: Wisdom and dreaming, both good things when shown at the right time by a young grown man, who wants to be succeeding, always, in every kind of living.73 It is a queer feeling that one has in them and perhaps it is, that they have something queer in them something that gives to one a strange uncertain feeling with them for their heads are on them as pulling babies heads are always on them and it gives to one a queer uncertain feeling to see heads on big women that look loose and wobbly on them.74 Johnson when he forgets his emotion, the emotion he had when he was friendly or loving or fighting, Johnson when he forgets his emotion and declares it to have been all the other one’s doing attributes his having yielded to this indulging in loving, fighting, friendly action, to the weakness in him of always yielding.75 It is certainly a difficult thing to know it of any one whether they have in them a kind of feeling, whether they have in them at some time any realisation that they are hurting some one, whether they had planned doing that thing.76 And Julia had known and then was not any longer knowing Charles Kohler, and then there was Arthur Keller whom in a way every one was quite certain would come to be sometime a brother-­in-­law to her and then there was one she was certainly needing to be one certainly to be existing as being one certainly teaching some one something, Linder Herne, and then there was the whole family that were relations to her, and then there was Florentine Cranach who was a cousin of James Cranach and then there was Hilda Breslau who might come later to be a sister-­in-­law to her but who really later married another, Ernest Brakes who was a painter, and then there was Selma Dehning who had married into the Dehning family and then had not any love for any one who was not a Dehning and then there was Ella and Fred and their little baby, Robert Housman who came very of­ten to stay with them the Dehnings and with Mrs.



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Hersland, and then there was Mrs. Conkling the aunt of Selma Dehning and then there was a cousin of Mrs. Conkling and she had five children and they were all girls and all in a way earning their living and very nice girls in home living and Julia liked going out with them.77 The one remembering completely remembering something about each one being in the family living has been completely remembering everything about any one being in the family living, is remembering completely remembering everything about some being in the family living, is completely remembering something about every one being in the family living, will be completely remembering everything about some being in the family living will completely remember something about every one being in the family living.78

Stein was profoundly interested in how we occupy the present, and how the present itself breaks down into a swirl of recollections, sensations, and anticipations. Her novella “Many Many Women” (composed 1910) mimics this synthesis by integrating multiple tenses within single lines and gerund-­heavy refrains. Seen in the following spindle diagram, a page can feature as many as seven different tenses:79 She was renewing what was continuing. She was being and she was living. She was having what was enjoying. She was doing what was collecting. If there were many and there are many, if there were many then some of them would be satisfying some of them are not satisfying some of them are satisfying is satisfied by some of them is satisfied because they are satisfactory the satisfy them. One to be satisfying must be satisfying.

any one and any one and any one. And any one who

ones that

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She and she herself had come to something and was succeeding in having had what she had given to be needing to be receiving what she was receiving, she was not asking what any one could be answering she was asking that she should continue to give what she gave and get what she got. If she were quietly doing what she was doing she would be receiving what she was receiving but she would not be having what she was having and she would not have been asking what she had been asking. She did give every one she was needing what she was needing to give to them. She was feeling what she came to be feeling when she came to have what she was having. She came to want to be enjoying what she was feeling in doing what she was doing. She came to feel that she was having what she was having and she might be doing what she was doing.80

Is, having been, has been, being, was, had, could—“Many Many Women” moves the way a cloud of fish does: dense, circling around a rhetorical center (“Each one is one”), scattering into separates, but always regrouping into a meticulously structured mass. The world that Stein’s “many many women” inhabit revolves around the self-­renewing “one.” To persist in ones isn’t only to persist in self-­contained wholes, but also to reenter Stein’s con-



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tinuous present. Numbers run obsessively through­out Stein, yet the laws of numerical progression aren’t taken seriously until later in her career. In truth, all of Stein’s literary devices reinforce the “continuous present” to a degree. In “Composition as Explanation,” Stein writes, “Continuous present is one thing and beginning again and again is another thing. These are both things. And then there is using everything.”81 She goes on to explain that the “continuous present” works with “using everything” and “beginning again” to ward off “the quality in a composition that makes it go dead just after it has been made.”82 Stein combines progressive verb forms (“continuous present”) with repetition (“beginning again”) and collaging (“using everything”), pasting in all of the different things from different times one dwells on in different ways at once to reinvigorate contemporary writing. For most of modern literature, in her eyes, had lost its freshness. It was written in past tense about characters going about their lives in predictable ways. (One recalls Virginia Woolf complaining in her essay “Modern Fiction” [1921] about what she believed to be Edwardian fiction’s formulaic twists and turns.) Repeating variations of entire sentences or phrases interrupts such patterns by hindering narrative development. “Beginning again and again” poetically enacts the here and now in that no traditional plot advances. Nothing technically “happens” for large chunks of The Making of Ameri­cans, for example. Stein herself asserts, “This [book] was one of my first efforts to give the appearance of one time-­ knowledge, and not to make it a narrative story. This is what I mean by immediacy of description.”83 Glimpsed in works such as Everybody’s Auto­ biography (1937), Matisse Picasso and Gertrude Stein, and, again, The Making of Ameri­cans, repeating “one,” in particular, aggressively opposes the logic of one, two, three, four, ad infinitum. Scrambling numerical sequences achieves the same end: holding us in the present. In A Novel of Thank You (composed 1925–26), the line “Chapter two and chapter twenty-­two and then to remember chapter twenty-­two”84 falls under the heading “Chapter Two,” which crops up between “Chapters XLII” and “XLIII.” “Lifting Belly” moves from “Part II” to “II,” looping back upon itself. “A Sonatina Followed by Another” (composed 1921) plays with its title’s sequential implications by organizing itself around subheadings that do anything but. Roman numerals of­ten give way to snippets that splinter into identically titled plays. “I,” “II,” and “Annex to No. 2 Sonatina Followed by Another Not Yet Sat but Walking” flows into “Last Part,” which subdivides into One Sonatina Followed by Another Divided by a Play, A Play, A Play, and yet another A Play. The present looms before us, serenely extending in every direction, all-­encompassing, unbroken. Hermetic language likewise continues the present by obstructing our

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ability to make sense of what was and will be read. As the last chapter suggested, without any narrative threads to hold onto, our attention shifts to sounding words out and tracing their visual layout on the page. And such words resist memory. The average reader would be hard-­pressed to recite lines or events from Stein’s “Orta or One Dancing” (1912), so unintelli­ gible is it by conventional standards. Convention is the problem here. Faced with intelligible art, the audience can easily be distracted by past and future musings. As a case in point, Stein’s essay “Plays” (1935) alleges that the theater is an unfortunate contradiction in terms, since it aims to deliver life’s immediacy without allowing audiences to immediately engage with its delivered goods: “Your sensation as one in the audience in relation to the play played before you your sensation I say your emotion concerning that play is always either behind or ahead of the play at which you are looking and to which you are listening. So your emotion as a member of the audience is never going on at the same time as the action of the play.”85 The majority of Stein’s productions disavow conventional narrative to collapse as much as possible the gap between real time and stage time. Stein stylizes her thoughts in a manner that bypasses the readerly time lag surrounding traditional sentence and storytelling structures: the encounter, then reflections, then searching for subtextual insights behind those reflections, and so on.

i Picking up the camera recorder metaphor introduced in the last chapter, both Stein and the surrealists embraced alternative psychedelic states in their quest to transcribe sensory impressions as spontaneously as possible. Stein once told Steward, “The creative act is wonderful. Remembering is not the way of creative thinking and writing. Creating is not remembering but experiencing. It is to look and to hear and to write – without remembering. It is the immediate feelings arranged in words as they occur to me.”86 Yet Stein eventually became more than skeptical of the claim that anyone could write from a genuinely dissociated state, having studied motor automatism in laboratory settings as a Johns Hopkins medical student. (Steward, for one, remembers Stein throwing several jabs at surrealist authors, ever keen to distinguish her experiments from their own. One such stab went: “Nowadays everyone pretends nobody wrote the book a reader is reading, that they are all written while an author is doing something else. All the other writers do this thing. But someone wrote it so why pretend. All writing is necessarily or partly autobiographical so why pretend.”87) Near the turn of the twentieth century, she published two Psychology Re­



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view papers on the subject: “Normal Motor Automatism” (1896) and “Cultivated Motor Automatism: A Study of Character in Its Relation to Attention” (1898).88 These studies provided the basis for Stein’s later conceptual revisions to the idea of automatism, helping her develop those improvisational techniques that would make her famous. With only her coauthor, Leon M. Solomons and Stein herself as participants, the 1896 study tracks the dissociative quality attributed to dual tasks such as writing while reading a story; reading aloud while listening to a story; or reading aloud one’s allegedly automatic script while listening to a story, itself dictated by a subject instructed to simultaneously listen to his or her own recitation.89 More interesting than the paper’s tentatively worded conclusions is its description of Stein’s unique responses as a test case. Under the subheading “Spontaneous automatic writing,” Solomons observes the following: This became quite easy after a little practice. We had now gained so much control over our habits of attention that distraction by reading was almost unnecessary. Miss Stein found it sufficient distraction of­ten to simply read what her arm wrote, but following three or four words behind her pencil. All the phenomena observed in the writing at dictation were confirmed here—the order of disappearance from consciousness, extra personality, difference between memory and consciousness, etc. Two very interesting phenomena were here observed for the first time. A marked tendency to repetition. – A phrase would seem to get into the head and keep repeating itself at every opportunity, and hang over from day to day even. The stuff written was grammatical, and the words and phrases fitted together all right, but there was not much connected thought. The unconsciousness was broken into every six or seven words by flashes of consciousness, so that one cannot be sure but what the slight element of connected thought which occasionally appeared was due to these flashes of consciousness. But the ability to write stuff that sounds all right, without consciousness, was fairly well demonstrated by the experiments. Here are a few specimens: “Hence there is no possible way of avoiding what I have spoken of, and if this is not believed by the people of whom you have spoken, then it is not possible to prevent the people of whom you have spoken so glibly. . . .” Here is a bit more poetical than intelligible: “When he could not be the longest and thus to be, and thus to be, the strongest.” And here one that is neither: “This long time when he did this best time, and he could thus have

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been bound, and in this long time, when he could be this to first use of this long time. . . .” In this automatic writing from invention appeared more strongly than anywhere else the fact that the motor impulse is necessary for the feeling of personality. For it was easy here for long periods to get the process in a condition where there was of­ten an expectation of what word would be written, but no intention to write it. One watched his arm with an idle curiosity, wondering whether or no the expected word would be written. In these experiments more than in any others did we feel the need of supposing that consciousness accompanies motor currents. If we wrote without watching what we wrote the writing was rapid and very illegible. By watching the writing, however, or, more correctly, by keeping our eyes on it, for there was no attention to it, the writing was kept even, legible, and at moderate speed. The control of movements by return sensation of sight is thus demonstrated to be an automatic process.90

Strangely enough, right after underlining the “need of supposing that consciousness accompanies motor currents,” Solomons infers that watching oneself write can be an automatic process. Similarly going against his argument’s internal logic, he cites examples of Stein’s “poetical” and nonsensical language right after asserting that she writes mostly grammatical “stuff.” Stein’s “poetical” as opposed to “intelligible” expressions would intensify as she experimented with different hermetic forms over her career. A reassessment of her earlier faith in automatic responses accompanies this evolution. For Stein, automatism becomes a popu­lar misnomer for consciously improvisational writing. By the 1930s, unlike Breton and his friends, who never subjected psychography to clinical analy­sis, Stein pronounced it a sham. No matter how swiftly writers jot down their thoughts without pause for reflection, they are always present on some level, consciously directing the flow of words—in Stein’s case, very much so to conquer the challenge of speaking in a truly nongrammatical, nonsensical fashion. One can speculate that Stein’s greater sense of being present accounts for the more modest backlash against surrealist automatic works. Aside from the gender and language barrier (the most famous surrealist authors were men origi­nally writing in French), legibility might tip the scale here. Even in their zanier moments, surrealist writings provoke little outrage because they are fairly accessible. The mind reverts to familiar syntactical patterns when drifting. Stein’s origi­nality stems from how she attempts to disrupt such reflexes. One isn’t unconscious so much as conscious in a precise way while writing. And this heightened state of consciousness—­hyperconsciousness—finds



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parallels everywhere through­out history. It bears resemblance to Talmudic trances; theater im­provisa­tion­alist Viola Spolin’s “point of concentration,” where ego and self-­consciousness fade into the background onstage; the Russian spiritualist Helena Blavatsky’s spells to merge with the cosmos; the “selflessness” advocated in Buddhist scripts; the spirit behind Jack Kero­ uac’s “spontaneous prose” sessions; and the free­styling mentality driving 2 Live Crew’s Live in Concert, the first live rap album ever. But regardless of how much Stein drew upon her Johns Hopkins experiences through­out her life, or how similar her creative process may have been to that of the surrealists, W. B. Yeats, Arthur Conan Doyle, and countless others on the record, part of the reason why Stein was so eager to distance herself from automatic writing—to reclassify it as consciously controlled activity—was to guard herself against the stigma surrounding improvisational literature. In principle, the surrealists did not care whether they were taken seriously as authors. Under the banner of art as action as opposed to artifacts, these lifestyle junkies could shrug off questions of in­ di­vidual talent. They likened themselves to mindless “receptacles,” as the previous chapter noted, when organizing séances. Stein, conversely, was keen on having her brilliance recognized; and the prerequisites for literary achievement (unlike in the Ameri­can theater, now somewhat congenial to improvisational stage work in the wake of successful companies such as the Second City) remain toil and craft. So when the psychologist B. F. Skinner accuses Stein of automatism in “Has Gertrude Stein a Secret?” (1934), Stein refutes not only any subliminal influence but the underhanded accusation at stake: spontaneous invention. If her work owes something to automatic writing, such detractors reason, it’s not worth reading, because improvisational art feels gimmicky and lazy. Long before Skinner’s article, dismissive remarks such as “[Dorothy Richardson] does not [. . .] shut herself up in a dark room and put herself in a hypnotic condition like Gertrude Stein and record whatever jumble of words may come to her”91 and “[Stein is] what the Germans call ‘Wort-­salad,’ a style particularly cultivated by crazy people. [. . .] The way to make a word-­salad is to sit in a dark room, preferably between the silent and mystic hours of midnight and dawn, and let the moving fingers write whatever comes”92 were circulating in the media, motivated by the same derision stirring those who first gasped before Duchamp’s placidly arranged toilets or Pollock’s drip canvases. But turning back to Skinner, Stein addresses his camp when she stresses in Everybody’s Autobiography (1937), “I did not think it [the Hopkins experiment] was automatic I do not think so now, I do not think any university student is likely certainly

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not under observation is likely to be able to do genuinely automatic writing, I do not think so, that is under normal conditions.”93 Even in private letters, she hastens to clarify that her work “is not so automatic as [Skinner] thinks. If there is any secret it is the other way to. I think I achieve by xtra consciousness, xcess.”94 Or hailing a broader audience, Stein avers in The Autobiography of Alice B. Toklas, “Gertrude Stein never had subconscious reactions, nor was she a successful subject for automatic writing.”95 This statement is disingenuous but understandable. She intuits that no matter the inspiration behind her experimental writing, conscious or unconscious, Skinner’s camp wouldn’t care. Skinner himself suspected that Stein had trained herself to realize a “not-­far-­from-­normal state”96 while conceiving most of her works. His complaint had to do with her compositional speed and relative lack of deliberation, which he found incompatible with “serious artistic experiment.”97 His complaints against Stein’s methods formed a pretext for his irritation with her final products themselves. Setting aside Stein’s plan of attack, Skinner passed the blanket judgment that whatsoever does not conform to mass-­market norms, and has not been leisurely prepared to boot, does not merit serious literary interest. “The mere generation of the effects of repetition and surprise is not in itself a literary achievement,”98 he dryly comments before ending his paper the next page over with: “I do not believe in the importance of the part of Miss Stein’s writing that does not make sense. On the contrary, I regret the unfortunate effect it has had in obscuring the finer work of a very fine mind. I welcome the present theory [of Stein’s automatism] because it gives one the free­dom to dismiss one part of Gertrude Stein’s writing as a probably ill-­advised experiment and to enjoy the other and very great part without puzzlement.”99 It is as though all of modernism had passed him by. According to Skinner’s conservative tastes, none of Dada, surrealist automa­ tism, or abstract expressionism should survive—beyond ignoring a Kandinsky or a Pollock, even a Picasso. Before such an inimical readership, Stein sets out to explain her craft on its own terms. As she dismantles the principle of time-­intensive draftsmanship (although those who try to replicate her creative process swiftly find that their results do not measure up to hers), she makes a special effort to combat aesthetic populism—the notion that art should be open to mass consumption from the outset, purged of any abstruseness. Returning to The Autobiography of Alice B. Toklas, the Stein who declares, “The sentences of which Marcel Brion, the french critic has written, by exactitude, austerity, absence of variety in light and shade, by refusal of the use of the subconscious Gertrude Stein achieves a symmetry which has a close



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analogy to the symmetry of the musical fugue of Bach,” favorably aligns her abstract gestures within a broader classical tradition, underscoring how exotic the canon is by the same stroke. Even Skinner, despite his misunderstandings, glimpses this “Bachian” aesthetic at work. He describes Stein’s style as “cold,” sacrificing a sense of “personal history or of a cultural background”101 for an interest in “the sensory things nearest at hand—objects, sounds, tastes, smells, and so on.”102 He describes none other than Stein’s ideal artistic mind-­set. It offers the kind of imaginative free­dom that even the ill-­fated Desnos dreamt of in his own journey away from automatism. Weary of Breton’s theatrics, and falling in with the somber atmosphere of occupied France, Desnos eventually reenvisages art in existential terms: “It seems to me that beyond Surrealism there is something very mysterious to be dealt with, that beyond automatism there is the intentional, that beyond poetry there is the poem, that beyond poetry received there is poetry imposed, that beyond free poetry there is the free poet.”103 There are more ways than one to be free. Beyond the free­dom afforded to us by sleep, what happens when we revisit free will? Formalized in the 1930s in her essay “What Are Master-­pieces and Why Are There So Few of Them” (1936) and poetic treatise The Geographical History of America, Stein’s optimal mentality for writing in the full free­ dom of lucid thought is described as “entity” or “human mind.” These two terms are dropped interchangeably and juxtaposed against their similarly fused counterparts: “identity” and “human nature.” In order to compose masterpieces (the Bible, Homeric works, Shakespeare’s canon—all examples listed in The Geographical History of America), which are stubbornly apo­liti­cal, self-­justifying, and impervious to market pressures for Stein, she advises authors to forget to the best of their abilities their names, friends, lovers, families, ambitions, and experiences—quite literally, their personal identities, their very humanity. To prevent our prose from becoming “lifeless,”104 we need to wiggle free from overthinking things, premeditating every move, getting stuck inside of our heads, worrying about our pub­lic image, fretting over sales, worshipping “Mammon.”105 Reaching the sweet spot requires cultivating an impersonal consciousness that immerses us in our immediate surroundings. Undistracted by memories or embarrassment before potential readers, writers can lose track of the oppressively ticking clock. The meditative state that Stein advocates soothes and empties the mind, now able to invent more purely for itself. Much of Stein’s aesthetic theorizing here resonates with Spolin’s in Improvisation for the Theater, where “concentrating” in a particular way can unlock “momentary genius.”106 To achieve the same goal of “transcending the limita100

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tion of the familiar [. . .] [of ] handed-­down frames of reference, memory choked with old facts and information and undigested theories and techniques of other people’s findings,”107 Spolin advises her readers to hold a “point of concentration” during scenes, a mental exercise that bears an uncanny resemblance to Stein’s own. For Spolin, The Point of Concentration is the magical focus that preoccupies and blanks the mind (the known), cleans the slate, and acts as a plumb-­bob into our very own centers (the intuitive), breaking the walls that keeps us from the unknown, ourselves, and each other. With a singleness of focus, everyone is intent on observing the solving of the problem, and there is no split of personality. For both players and audience the gap between watching and participating closes up as subjectivity gives way to communication and becomes objectivity. Spontaneity cannot come out of duality, out of being “watched” whether it be the player watching himself or fearful of outside watchers.108

The artist operates like a special beast of instinct for both women. The claim that one is writing only for oneself is a common fib among the literati. Here, it is an overstatement on Stein’s part developed in re­action to her writer’s block following The Autobiography of Alice B. Toklas’s commercial success. Plagued by feelings that she had “sold out,” and unable to write at ease for months after the book’s release, Stein began philosophizing in earnest on the perils of mainstream appeal even as she continued courting pub­lic recognition.109 As if expiating for all the worldly ambition displayed in The Autobiography of Alice B. Toklas— Gertrude Stein was in those days a little bitter, all her unpublished manuscripts, and no hope of publication or serious recognition.110 Not, as she always explains, that she could ever have enough glory. After all, as she always contends, no artist needs criticism, he only needs appreciation. If he needs criticism he is no artist.111 One writes for oneself and strangers but with no adventurous publishers how can one come in contact with those same strangers.112 This event [Lucy Church Amiably (1930) being displayed in Parisian bookstores] gave Gertrude Stein a childish delight amounting almost to ecstasy. She had never seen a book of hers in a bookstore window before, except a french translation of the Ten Portraits, and she spent all her time in her



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wanderings about Paris looking at the copies of Lucy Church Amiably in the windows and coming back and telling me about it.113 Gertrude Stein wants readers not collectors. In spite of herself her books have too of­ten become collector’s books.114

—Stein changes her tune in the Vanity Fair article “And Now” (1934). Be careful what you wish for, she cautions, for fame poses its own psychological consequences: What happened to me was this. When the success began and it was a success I got lost completely lost. You know the nursery rhyme, I am I because my little dog knows me. Well you see I did not know myself, I lost my personality. It has always been completely included in myself my personality as any personality naturally is, and here all of a sudden, I was not just I because so many people did know me. It was just the opposite of I am I because my little dog knows me. So many people knowing me I was I no longer and for the first time since I had begun to write I could not write and what was worse I could not worry about not writing and what was also worse I began to think about how my writing would sound to others, how could I make them understand, I who had always lived within myself and my writing. And then all of a sudden I said there that it is that is what was the matter with all of them all the young men whose syrup did not pour, and here I am being just the same. They were young and I am not but when it happens it is just the same, the syrup does not pour.115

The “syrup” here, as Timothy W. Galow clarifies in Writing Celebrity: Stein, Fitzgerald, and the Modern(ist) Art of Self-­Fashioning (2011), alludes to her experimental output. When taking her expository pieces into account, her overall productivity remained fairly steady in the months following the autobiography’s release. Another instance where it becomes tricky to take Stein at face value (and chapter 5 treads over this gray zone as well) is when she appears to elevate the “human mind” or “entity” beyond a thought-­ experiment—to a literal possibility. As Galow puts it, Stein “knows that she can never escape entirely into the placid existence of the human mind.”116 Nor does she want to, as evidenced in works representative of nature/­ identity: Three Lives, The Autobiography of Alice B. Toklas, Wars I Have Seen, and Brewsie and Willie. In Ida as well, the narrative progresses in sectioned intervals, grammar prevails, time passes, and the heroine—articulate, self-­ conscious, socialized—ages. All of these texts are steeped in emotions,

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relationships, and narrative arcs. More broadly, Stein’s entire oeuvre is intensely autobiographical, indebted to those very parts of herself she publicly denies. The Stein who scoffs at The Autobiography of Alice B. Toklas keeps trying to peddle it to Hollywood moviemakers from 1936 onward.117 The Stein who complains about writers pandering to the general pub­lic feels no guilt devouring popu­lar literature (works authored by Harry Leon Wilson, Dashiell Hammett, Harold Bell Wright, James Oliver Curwood, Rex Beach, John Fox Jr., Helen MacInnes, Edgar Wallace, and Joseph Smith Fletcher118) in her spare hours.

i While Stein moves through, and between, several stylistic phases, her preoccupation with a timelessly insular aesthetic attitude—writing without regard for audiences, detached from conventional ways of relating to the world—began as early as her Harvard Annex (Radcliffe College) years with William James and George Santayana. Her lifelong interest in transmitting sensory impressions in the most unemotionally instantaneous way possible melds, in part, something of their findings, themselves rooted in an Ameri­can Romantic ethos antithetical to “personality.” (Whitman’s poetic voice dissipating into nature’s oblivion by the end of “Song of Myself” [1855] would be a familiar example.) Inspired by James, Stein explores a psychology oriented around linguistic connectives (conjunctions, punctuation) as opposed to blocks (nouns, verbs). In so doing, she suggests that a new mentality requires a new language, while a new language makes possible, by a reciprocal logic, alternative mentalities. Ultimately, Stein isn’t so much submerging us in easily relatable feelings and situations as reformulating the language through which experiences attain meaning. In the process of dramatiz­ing our sensorium —­how consciousness directs itself toward objects—she reorders the logic by which the world can be rendered into an aesthetic phenomenon. While modernism as a whole attempts to represent the workings of consciousness as immediately as possible, none of its writers do so as extravagantly as Stein. There is the stream-­of-­consciousness technique, of which Joyce and Woolf are masters. And then there is Stein’s stylized consciousness that does not follow a recognizable stream as such, where the in­di­vidual disappears into an almost posthuman ideal—the anti-­ego, entity, mind, an alien something. As for Santayana, his championing personal disengagement for a­ rtists and art lovers alike in works such as The Sense of Beauty (1896) set the



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precedent for Stein’s belief that everyday attachments detract from creative achievement. Like Santayana, just how much of a phenomenologist Stein is remains remarkable. She wrote her chief avant-­garde works at the same time Edmund Husserl, the Jewish German founder of phenomenology, was writing his, and was probably influenced by Santayana’s aesthetic attitudes during her undergraduate years. In an endnote buried in Marjorie Perloff’s Wittgenstein’s Ladder (1996), a telling reference to Santayana can be found: “After Stein’s death, when Toklas was asked by Allegra Stewart whether Stein had ever read Wittgenstein, Toklas insisted that she hadn’t. Santayana, James, Whitehead—these, she said, were Stein’s masters.”119 Stein studied at Harvard from 1893 to 1898. The Spanish Ameri­can philosopher and man of letters Santayana was one of Stein’s philosophy instructors there. One of the first serious aestheticians to come out of North America, he was also influenced by William James and separately pursuing the perceptual themes that so gripped Husserl.120 Stein and Santayana may not have shared a personal rapport,121 but evidence indicates a creative exchange occurred. Both were impressed by James’s enthusiasm for perceptual immediacy.122 Santayana’s investment in discerning and appreciating the essence of beauty presumably made an impression on Stein. As secretary of the Philosophy Club, Stein invited Santayana to read a paper at one of its meetings. He chose to pre­ sent “Faith and Criticism,”123 an early blueprint for Scepticism and Animal Faith (1923), his first formal treatise on essences in general. One of the few scholars to associate Stein and Santayana, Linda Wagner-­ Martin points out in her Stein biography that Santayana’s theory of aesthetic disengagement potentially foregrounded Stein’s artistic method: “The most significant of Santayana’s beliefs about writing, for Gertrude, was his theory that the artist made correct choices not through reason but through ‘contemplation,’ what he called ‘the intuition of essences.’ [. . .] Santayana believed that the human mind operated in two modes, one of participation (‘the sense of existence’) and the other of disengagement (‘the intuition of pure being’). While most people lived largely in the participatory mode, the artist needed at times to be disengaged in order to create.”124 Stein’s method that Wagner-­Martin refers to is her poetics of “entity” or the “human mind,” the creative consciousness brought up before that empties the writer of emotions, memory, and social awareness. But here we run into some biographical confusion. The only texts Wagner-­Martin cites to support her claim are Santayana’s Realms of Being (1927–40) and Persons and Places (1944), all released decades after Stein had left Boston, and all suggest­

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ing much more of Husserl’s immediate influence despite Santayana’s protests otherwise.125 Only the publication of Santayana’s The Sense of Beauty coincided with Stein’s time at Harvard. All that can be speculated in fairness is that Stein’s hermetic approach to literature may have been inspired as early on as during her Harvard years with Santayana, who espoused a kind of phenomenological attitude through the mode of pure intuition that Wagner-­Martin identifies and is most clearly delineated later in his The Realm of Essence (1927). As the first book in the Realms of Being, a four-­volume series extending the insights begun in Scepticism and Animal Faith, it defines the term “essence” as the “platonic or graphic sense of being a theme open to consideration.”126 Beholding the essence of beauty induces a strange trance in the Santayanian observer: “Beauty has burst upon me and the reins have dropped from my hands. I am transported, in a certain measure, into a state of trance. I see with extraordinary clearness, yet what I see seems strange and wonderful, because I no longer look in order to understand, but only in order to see. I have lost my preoccupation with fact, and am contemplating an essence. This experience, in modern times, is called aesthetic.”127 Santayana goes on to assert that “the most contemplative minds [. . .] may survey or foresee action, [but] they do not live in action, because they see it in its wholeness and in its results; as a spectator who sees the plot of a play understands the emotions of the characters; but does not succumb to them.”128 For Santayana, artists distance themselves from the everyday world to create works of origi­nality and depth. Otherwise, the artistic mind risks becoming cluttered by the commotion of humdrum life. Whatever inspiration happened (or didn’t) in Boston, Stein moved on to participate in the West’s broader turn-­of-­the-­century reaction against reigning epistemological models. Her essays “Poetry and Grammar” and “Composition as Explanation” especially detail this transitional process. “Nothing changes from generation to generation except the thing seen and that makes a composition,” Stein reflects.129 When sociocultural perceptions change, so do aesthetic modes, the latter intertwined with the former. “Poetry and Grammar” similarly evokes the rhetoric of thingness by emphasizing direct contact with the object-­world: “And so for me the problem of poetry was and it began with Tender Buttons to constantly realize the thing anything so that I could recreate that thing. [. . .] The noun must be replaced not by inner balance but by the thing in itself and that will eventually lead to everything.”130 Stein’s mantra “Rose is a rose is a rose is a rose” becomes a thoroughly phenomenological statement in this light. Echoing the Bible’s “I am that I am,” not to mention Rumi’s “the essence of the es-



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sence of the essence of light,” it resists the type of discursive thought Husserl despised, the overdrawn recourse to prior ­philosophers—­in Stein’s case, metaphors. Stein renews our experience of a rose by avoiding the baggage of all the different roses littered through­out literary history. She does so by countering the semantic depletion that metaphoric deferral incurs, where A is equated with B, B with C, C with D, and so on—what Umberto Eco impatiently dubs “hermetic semiosis.”132 Like “modernism,” “rose” may point to so many things as to mean nothing. So Stein obliterates further analogies: a rose is nothing save itself.133 131

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The Drowned

H

alf a decade before the Jewish Italian writer Primo Levi published “The Drowned and the Saved,” an essay featured in his 1947 Ausch­ witz memoir If This Is a Man,1 Stein was already invoking the drowning motif in relation to Jewish lives lost in the Holocaust. In To Do, little James, Jonas, Jewel, and Jenny drown in a river they try to cross for the sake of finding spare birthdays on the other side. In Mrs. Reynolds, the Reynoldses constantly allude to mysterious drownings, vanishings, and escapes from an ominous elsewhere. A nameless overweight woman is said to have a “thin husband who looked as if he had just escaped,”2 while Mrs. Reynolds lives in dread that she and her husband “would be drowned and lots of them were completely drowned in water, drowned dead in w ­ ater.”3 The waters these characters encounter ripple within and without their mind’s eye, encroaching upon their lives as both terrible metaphors and liter­ali­ ties. They undulate before the living and dormant. For Stein, an author who self-­identified as a Jew (and was far from naive enough to deem her personal preferences a deciding factor in how the world would categorize her), Hitler’s Europe had morphed into an endlessly watery kingdom. The atmosphere pervading many of Stein’s last works evokes a certain dampness. Their rivers, lakes, streams, oceans, swamps, bogs, muddy trenches, and sinkholes feel perilous for the unsuspecting wayfarer under a moonless night. The possibility that one could drown at any moment was surreal. Surrealism became an apt vehicle for encapsulating such possibilities— and for thinking through them. The movement now mattered to Stein in a way it hadn’t before, because her life was on the line. If Stein had truly been a pro-­Nazi collaborationist somehow miraculously living without fear in Vichy France, her career would almost certainly have ended without any legibly nightmarish visions of Hitler’s shadow. It is reasonable to believe that she would have written more of the same: either realist narratives in the mold of her debut novel Three Lives (save with a fascist edge) or hermetic prose poems unruffled by ongoing po­liti­cal upheavals. The world would hardly have felt surreal, since it would, in theory, have been one the author felt at home in.



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But Stein had been uneasy about identity politics in Europe since before the First World War. A series of pub­lic scandals recalled in Wars I Have Seen—“the famous Oscar Wilde trial and the question of pub­lic opinion and [. . .] the Dreyfus case and anti-­semitism”4—had sharpened her awareness of her predicament as a Jewish lesbian. Wilde’s imprisonment “impressed” the long-­term expatriate for demonstrating how “anybody can be a prisoner now” without cause,5 while the Dreyfus affair confirmed France’s thriving prejudices. Europeans still believed that Jews enjoyed an inordinate amount of financial, and hence po­liti­cal, clout in the West­ern world, although, as Stein sighs, “financially there is no sense in anti-­semitism.”6 All anti-­Semitism everywhere, according to Stein, operates as an exercise in surrealist absurdity. The German variant had graduated into a hysteri­ cal phobia: “There are such funny thing, how can a nation that feels itself as strong as the Germans do be afraid of a small handful of people like the Jews.”7 As afraid as she became in Vichy France, Stein could intuit a sister fear nestled at the heart of the German crusade. In more ways than one, Stein reminds us that even obliquely understated wartime experiences can come from a place of profound unease. There is no doubt where her sympathies lay, even if her later friendships and reactionary comments have incurred a storm of bad press. The controversy has to do with Stein’s attitude regarding the Vichy government— and, by extension, Nazi Germany. That she agreed, as mentioned in the opening chapter, to introduce and translate a number of Pétain’s speeches in the early 1940s; was intimate with Faÿ, a Vichy official in charge of the Bibliothèque nationale; nominated Hitler for the Nobel Peace Prize in a 1934 New York Times article; was photographed making a Nazi salute in 1945; and managed to survive the war with all of her possessions intact has tarnished her reputation as a visionary writer. While the translation project was Faÿ’s idea, Stein’s initial enthusiasm for it doesn’t help. To make matters worse, Stein wrote a letter urging for Faÿ’s pardon postliberation. Following Stein’s death, and extending the spirit behind such wartime loyalties, Toklas smuggled Faÿ the funds to flee from a prison hospital to Switzerland in 1951. The couple never abandoned their friend and benefactor. He sent nearly a thousand Freemasons to concentration camps, with a little over half never to return.8 But for Stein and Toklas, he remained a former aide during the direst of times. There is no evidence they were familiar with the nitty-­gritty particulars of his day-­to-­day affairs. His murderous Gestapo connections were unknown to the Anglophone world un­ til fairly recently—and primarily through two texts: police official Lucien

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­Sabah’s Une police politique de Vichy: Le service des sociétés secrètes (1996) and former lover Geuydan de Roussel’s private journal.9 Faÿ’s trial records remain sealed to this day. In a recent anthology, Primary Stein: Returning to the Writing of Gertrude Stein (2014), Phoebe Stein and Steven Gould Axelrod are among the latest to add their voices to this debate and, hopefully, put it to rest. Without oversimplifying Stein’s po­liti­cal conservativism, the pair take pains to reiterate how overblown the polemic has become. In the chapter “History, Narrative, and ‘Daily Living’ in Wars I Have Seen,” Phoebe Stein traces the media onslaught against Stein, while Axelrod closes the volume with a reflection on Stein’s antipathy toward Hitler. The former begins by calling attention to one of the first scholarly articles on Stein’s interest in Pétain, Wanda Van Dusen’s “Portrait of a National Fetish: Gertrude Stein’s ‘Introduction to the Speeches of Maréchal Pétain’ (1942),” an essay published over two decades ago in Modernism/modernity. Adopting a psychoanalytic framework, Van Dusen reads Stein’s unpublished introduction as a Freudian attempt to fetishize a soon-­to-­be-­former national hero. The France that Stein paints for the Ameri­can pub­lic is a bucolic ideal, consisting of genteel farmers unafflicted by postindustrial existential woes. There is no mention of women, Jews, the poor, sexual deviants, gypsies, Free­masons, communists, leftists, or the avant-­garde in this Jeffersonian world. At the same time, Van Dusen hastens to remind us that Stein was far from the only modernist to harbor reactionary leanings, and that she herself was in a vulnerable position as a Jew living in Vichy France. Po­liti­cal maneuvering (courting favor from Faÿ and the like) was essential. From Van Dusen onward, tensions surrounding the author’s pub­lic image escalated until their peak in 2012. Two museum exhibitions devoted to Stein, the Contemporary Jewish Museum’s Seeing Gertrude Stein: Five Stories and the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art’s The Steins Collect, opened in 2011, the same year that Barbara Will’s book on the Stein-­Faÿ connection landed on bookshelves. By the time The Steins Collect started its sec­ond run at New York’s Metropolitan Museum of Art, picketers and journalists (in­clud­ing the New Yorker’s aforementioned Greenhouse) had begun circulating increasingly sensationalist accounts of Stein’s collabora­ tionist efforts and support for Hitler.10 Stein morphed from a liberal darling to a self-­hating Jew despising other Jews. In the Huffington Post, civil rights lawyer and bestselling writer Alan M. Dershowitz blasts the Met for presenting “an incomplete and distorted account of what actually happened.”11 “Stein and Toklas survived the Holocaust for one simple reason,” he announces, “Gertrude Stein was herself a major collaborator with the Vichy



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regime and a supporter of its pro-­Nazi leadership.” Assemblyman Dov Hikind and Manhattan Borough President Scott Stringer unleashed equally damning statements in their joint push to have the Met somehow highlight that, to quote Hikind directly, “this collection exists because Gertrude Stein sold her soul. [. . .] She lived in comfort, aiding the Nazi cause while her fellow Jews were being robbed, tortured and murdered.”13 Penning an article in the Daily News titled “A Nazi Collaborator at the Met” (2012), reporter Richard Chesnoff claims Stein even enlarged her art collection during the war years. Her fall from pub­lic grace was profound enough that the Obama administration reissued its 2012 proclamation for Jewish Ameri­ can Heritage Month without Stein’s name on its list of his­tori­cal fig­ures.14 (As an interesting aside, Albert Einstein and Aaron Copland were also excised from the president’s origi­nal roster.) Strong words, indeed, against a voice unable to respond because long gone. Yet if Stein were alive, her defense would be forthright. None of Stein’s critics seem to have read her later works and biographies in detail, if at all.15 She wasn’t a fascist but a conservative Republican, by today’s standards, who was out of touch with current events due to obsolescence and an accumulated sense of entitlement as a bourgeois Ameri­can celebrity. (To the last, even as she outgrew that part of herself unfussed by Franco, Stein held fast against unions [what she once called “the last refuge of the incompetent”16], big government, and Franklin D. Roosevelt’s New Deal.) She strongly identified as an Orthodox Jew, even if a nonpracticing one. Her choosing not to publicize this matter in anti-­Semitic Europe remained as much a personal as a practical decision. While she wasn’t subjected to pogrom-­style violence (Kristallnacht was a terrifying, if distant, event for her, as it was for most Ameri­cans reading about it from elsewhere), she certainly wasn’t living in the lap of luxury. Her Parisian apartment on rue Christine was looted by the Gestapo. Even if her paintings escaped capture, the same could not be said for her precious cutlery, furniture, sheets, and clothes.17 A similarly up-­and-­down logic informed the author’s countryside living. Stein’s rented Bilignin home was comfortably furnished with personal belongings brought from Paris. Armed with Ameri­can passports and Faÿ’s clout, she and Toklas enjoyed a remarkable free­dom on the roads, a privilege Stein sums up as: “We are rather favored strangers, and we can move about fairly freely in our department.”18 As late as 1939, six years after the very first Nazi concentration camp, Dachau, came into being (and one year after travel restrictions were imposed on Jews everywhere within Nazi territory), the couple were driving back and forth across the Swiss border for 12

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museum outings. On the other hand, despite the initial optimism characterizing Stein’s Atlantic Monthly article “The Winner Loses: A Picture of Occupied France” (1940), hunger hounded the pair daily. Everyone obsesses over food in Wars I Have Seen: “Every day so much can happen and every day is just the same and is mostly food, food and in spite of all that is happening every day is food.”20 “There is one thing certain when there is no food or very little food, it is easy to digest, that food, much easier than when there is food, regular food.”21 Parisians cycle down to the countryside for provisions; provincials fret over supplies. It wasn’t unusual for Stein to walk seven to ten miles a day for fresh bread, vegetables, eggs, butter, flour, and milk. Black-­market costs gradually forced her to sell off the beloved Madame Cézanne with a Fan (1878).22 And like all French locals, the author faced the threat of stray bombs, blackouts, home intrusions, and being shot on sight if outside past curfew. The same as for the rest of the world, the particulars of what was happening inside the concentration camps and ghettos were unknown to her in real time. That daily roundups for these destinations were occurring was, however, well understood. The New York­ er’s Janet Flanner of­ten retrieved on-­the-­ground tidbits for Stein during her circuit assignments—for instance, that merchandise in Austria and Germany sported racially discriminating labels (“Aryan” versus “non-­Aryan”), and that hundreds of thousands seeking refuge in Spain were caught and interned at concentration camps around the border-­hugging Perpignan.23 On her own, besides tuning in to blacklisted radio broadcasts, Stein also kept herself abreast of current affairs by chatting with trusted neighbors and travelers, in­clud­ing the odd refugee. The terror of being taken to an unknown elsewhere was one she shared. In Wars I Have Seen, every refugee she meets or hears about reminds her of her own precarious status during what she calls these “mediaeval” times: “Mediaeval means, that life and place and the crops you plant and your wife and children, all are uncertain. They can be driven away or taken away, or burned away, or left behind, that is what it is to be mediaeval. [. . .] And now and here 1943, it is just like that, you take a train, you disappear, you move away your house is gone, your children too, your crops are taken away, there is nothing to say.”24 The plight of the taken could very well have become Stein’s own at a moment’s notice. Stein’s worry was never whether she would be deemed a collaborationist by other collaborationists, the Gestapo, Vichy government officials, the French resistance, or her neighbors, but rather whether any of these parties would rout her out as a Jew and treat her like her European brethren. She and Toklas were under no illusions regarding how the German admin19



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istration would categorize them. So the couple played up their Ameri­can glamour where appropriate, keeping a low profile otherwise to avoid deportation. Bluntly put, Stein evaded unwanted attention, not only through Faÿ’s grace but also as a result of local goodwill. She was considered an important Ameri­can expatriate writer rather than a locally registered Jew susceptible to all of the prejudices such distinctions garnered. (Not that Stein’s village acquaintances were unaware of her Jewish background— far from it.) It didn’t hurt that Stein was both charming and charismatic, taking significant measures to ingratiate herself with her neighbors. On more than one occasion, Steward notes Stein’s “remarkable powers of persuasion.”25 She most likely believed she could talk her way out of anything if push came to shove. With an almost smug air, Stein recounts describing her preferential treatment to a train-­ticket seller one day in 1943. In response to his gentlemanly query whether all of the German soldiers milling around the station weren’t “bothering” her, she says, “No we are women and past the age to be bothered and beside I said I am a writer and so the French people take care of me.”26 She wasn’t wrong. Steward recollects how the French approached Stein with deference at restaurants—even butcher shops, where she habitually cut waiting lines with impunity.27 They viewed her as holding a civilized occupation in Hitler’s uncivilized Europe. Equally as endearing to them was how she and Alice would express their appreciation for local maquisards. One “Hubert de R.” from Savoie would regularly drop by Stein’s Bilignin abode for lunch, food supplies, updates, and occasionally even gelatin sheets on which to forge false identification papers.28 Toklas would send baked goodies to the resistance at every given opportunity.29 Stein herself received pub­lic thanks for passing along information to Culoz’s resistance network at the war’s close.30 The pair’s pro-­resistance sentiments were of­ten accompanied by vio­ lently anti-­German ones. Refrains to the tune of “we like the maquis, hon­ neur aux maquis,”31 “Everybody is so pleased with the maquis taking ­Vichy,”32 and “We who lived in the midst of you salute you”33 drift in between brusque assertions that “a Napoleon a Hitler or a Julius Caesar”34 must be done away with. Stein’s last memoir bristles with the insistence that she knows the enemy, and that enemy is German. Such feelings can be traced back to at least the First World War. In The Autobiography of Alice B. Toklas, Stein prefaces a comparison between Germany’s totalitarian and America’s freethinking spirit with, “Gertrude Stein used to get furious when the english all talked about german organization. [.  .  .] Then another thing that used to annoy us dreadfully was the english statement that the germans in America would turn America against the allies.”35 As the First

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World War rages on, the couple fall out with their German neighbors and acquaintances. They simmer when the German governess of one of their Mallorca holiday neighbors hangs her national flag whenever Germany wins a military victory. Initially doted on for his charm, the German sculptor Arnold Rönnebeck loses his welcome at Stein’s salon as he becomes more military-­minded. He gets in the habit of flourishing pictures of the German navy without invitation. All too reminiscent of the view captured on bomber planes, his aerial photographs of north­ern France’s cathedrals are later torn up by Stein “in a rage.”36 The final straw is when Stein refuses Rönnebeck’s repeated pleas for her to visit him in Germany: “No, said Gertrude Stein, I like you alright but I don’t like germans.”37 To be for the resistance and against Germany isn’t incompatible with a lingering, if waning, affection for Pétain. Regarding Stein’s pro-­Pétain sentiments, not only were they common among the French until German forces occupied all of France in 1942 (and this point has been wearily repeated by many of Stein’s readers from at least the late 1990s), but they also ebbed as the war progressed. Her loyalties gradually shifted away from the elderly general to the underground resistance once the Vichy government’s fascist tenor became more apparent. Once fascism directly affected her daily life, it no longer invited any stray idealism. A national hero from the First World War, Pétain was widely perceived as a leader who had salvaged an impossible situation through his deft armistice negotiations. In 1940 his  brokering a deal with the Germans to prevent Paris from being bombed was considered a Herculean national victory (not to mention the overture to a long double game). Hostilities nearly ran higher toward the English than the Germans that year, as France reeled from Winston Churchill’s executive order to sink the French fleet at the North Af­ri­can port Mers-­el-­Kébir. England justified its attack from a defensive standpoint. The risk of the French navy, and therefore the Atlantic, falling into German hands was simply too great. Pétain’s refusal to quietly pass his battle­ ships over to Churchill or scuttle them entirely before the face of looming Nazi appropriation was deemed unpardonable. On the French side, the loss of more than 1,200 sailors from British shelling exacerbated resentments left over from the Battle of Dunkirk, itself generally felt to be the moment when the Allies abandoned the nation. It was only until the autumn of 1942 that Pétain’s popu­larity began to wane in earnest. The photograph of Pétain shaking hands with Hitler at the Montoire summit on Oc­to­ber 24, 1940, now seemed chillingly prophetic as the pub­lic increasingly identified the Maréchal’s regime with the Nazi administration. By 1942 the free press had been dissolved and the



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country legally remodeled into a police state. Horror over France’s impotence before Germany’s executing (mostly communist) French po­liti­cal prisoners during the late summer of 1941 continued festering (one hundred French hostages chosen at random were shot in retaliation for the communist resistance-­led assassination of a German officer stationed at Nantes). From March to July 1942, anti-­German demonstrations erupted in Lyon, Nice, Marseille, Clermont-­Ferrand, Toulon, Toulouse, Avignon, and Montpellier, among other cities. A little over thirteen thousand Jews were deported that very same July from Paris alone. Two months later, a new labor law was enacted, rendering all healthy men between the ages of eighteen and fifty years old, and single women twenty-­one to thirty-­ five years old, eligible for sudden deployment to Germany. When the Service du Travail Obligatoire replaced this voluntary draft on February 1943, men began defecting to the hills en masse, organizing themselves into maquisards. With Hermann Göring requisitioning around 15–20 percent of French produce from August 1942 onward, and a mercilessly tilted exchange rate on top (twenty francs to a Reichsmark), the national economy deteriorated to the extent that the average French ration provided only 1,050 calories a day. And then, of course, Pétain proved powerless to stop the German takeover of the free south­ern zone on No­vem­ber 11, 1942.38 Exacerbating France’s anxieties surrounding such events was the 1943 inauguration of Waffen-­SS officer Joseph Darnand’s milice, a homegrown paramilitary organization devoted to stamping out resistance activity. So, too, were the seemingly unending slights the French had to endure as a conquered people. When a Lyon journalist, Yves Farge, recounts his ongoing dismay, one can extrapolate the degree to which similar resentments simmered across the entire populace over the occupied years. In the following excerpt, Farge can barely contain his contempt for Germans entering Lyon in 1940: “The trolley-­bus from Tassin stopped to let a German motorized column pass, and some type on the bus dared to say in a loud voice ‘The French are at last going to learn what order really is.’ I nearly hit him.”39 By the time a retreating German army was massacring French civilians in 1944 (the atrocities committed in Oradour-­sur-­Glane and Tulle being among the most well known), Pétainism had all but petered out. With this his­tori­cal context in mind—France’s broader ambivalence to­ ward its puppet government—Stein’s translation project appears less star­ tling. Even for a Jew perennially disposed against Germans in general, supporting Pétain at the dawn of his police state wasn’t a controversial, but a mainstream, view. Within the pub­lic imagination, Pétain hovered as a counterforce to Hitler, not as one of the latter’s accomplices. Only

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later would Stein, like the majority of French nationals, lose faith in the Maréchal. If her po­liti­cal sympathies appear contradictory, they are no more or less so than France’s internal conflict as a whole. Despite its rich democratic tradition, France was a nation under Hitler, persecuting Jews, Freemasons, communists, Gaullists, and religious agitators—all the more shamefacedly in retrospect because not entirely to its shame then. The nation that prided itself on being an Enlightenment bastion was also host to the Dreyfus affair and an eager distributor of the Nazi propaganda film Jud Süss, rebranded by Vichy authorities as Le juif Süss as it was peddled through­out the free zone in 1941.40 Any reckoning of Stein’s war years remains incomplete without grasping Pétain’s disconcerting legacy for her adopted homeland. He held majority backing for roughly the first half of the occupation, his reign giving vent to fascist ideologies theretofore unevenly buffered by the Third Republic. When liberation dawned, no unanimous outcry against the Maréchal unleashed. Enough of the public’s nostalgic affection for its fallen hero existed to convince Pétain’s former protégé De Gaulle that execution was out of the question.41 Nothing in Stein’s archives suggests she understood the full extent of Pétain’s overzealous engagement with Hitler or his authoritarian tendencies. What is present in her publications, however, is a growing recognition of his impotence, even as she struggles to charitably salvage him as an aged leader under duress. “Conversations were leading very strangely in those days, in the days after the armistice,” Stein reflects in Wars I Have Seen, “And then there was Petain [sic]. So many points of view about him, so very many. I had lots of them, I was almost French in having so many. This was what happened to me about him.”42 Occupied France remains divided. Its wartime politics yield anything but closure. An enfeebled ­Pétain sinks into irrelevance: And all the time there is Petain, an old man a very old man and mostly nowadays everybody has forgotten all about him. Marechal Petain then did save France and saving France defeated Germany and defeating Germany he just had to go on living until the Russians whom he feared defeated Germany and the Ameri­cans whom he liked defeated Germany and the English whom he mistrusted defeated Germany [. . .]. And all the time everybody around him had so many points of view so many points so many points of view so many things going on inside them in each one of them. I remember some one coming it was in the end of ’40, and they said they had just come from America and they had just seen



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Marechal Petain and Petain had wanted to know how they felt about him over there and the man answered and said they did not like his persecuting, and he said, as for free-­masons I hate them, as for communists I am afraid of them, as for the Jews it is not my fault.43

While Stein still discloses some faith in his double game (a view that history has not vindicated), she nevertheless concedes the injuries accumulating under his watch. A brief moment of pride flares up when his old powers seem to return to him as he enters Paris amid the April 1944 Allied bombing raids—in Stein’s opinion, an act of physical courage44—but Wars I Have Seen mostly documents Pétain’s slow descent into po­liti­cal obsolescence, even twilight evil. For the French, according to Stein, “like to think there is no order and that there should be. That is Petain’s point of view, that was the point of view of a crazy man at the end of the last war in 1918, who one day started to ask everybody to show him their papers at the station.”45 Pétain’s taste for order acquires the gleam of lunacy, especially set against Nazi Germany’s obsession with ordering Aryan from Jewish strains. Stein’s later run-­in with a retired civil servant complaining about how his neighbors aren’t disinfecting their potato plants enough due to France’s “lack of order” escalates her frustrations with disciplinarian thought to a boiling point: “I was polite but I wanted to say oh Hell, you all feel you are in prison because you are always being ordered, and it is funny, if anybody is alone they want company and if they have company they want to be alone. Human beings are like that, finite and infinite, when they have peace they want war and when they have war they want peace.”46 Stein no longer has the stomach for chasing Pétain’s distorted memory through no man’s land. During peacetime, he inspired a sense of pride and plucky independence; during times of po­liti­cal unrest, he is the nation’s jailor. Stein’s shifting attitude can likewise be gleaned in her response to Random House head honcho Bennett Cerf in 1946. As longtime academic collaborators Edward M. Burns, Ulla E. Dydo, and William Rice highlight in “Gertrude Stein: Sep­tem­ber 1942 to Sep­tem­ber 1944,” the ninth (and highly publicized) appendix in their jointly edited volume The Letters of Gertrude Stein and Thornton Wilder (1996), Stein wrote to Cerf in early 1942 regarding her interest in translating Pétain. The letter containing this pitch, however, did not reach Cerf until February 1946, provoking his adamant refusal to promote this head of state he deemed an “appeaser, collaborator, Fascist.”47 To Cerf’s forceful response, Stein then clarifies, “KEEP YOUR SHIRT ON BENNETT DEAR LETTER RE PETAIN WAS WRITTEN IN

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1941.” In the same spirit, Stein evolves from being a cocktail party provocateur to a chagrined war zone correspondent. The woman who was prone to quip, “Hitler will never really go to war. [. . .] No, Mussolini—­ there’s the dangerous man, for he is an Italian realist. He won’t stop at anything,”49 “[Veterans] feel disappointed, not about the 1914–1918 war but about this war. They liked that war, it was a nice war, a real war a regular war,”50 or “What difference does [the form of government] make except to the people in power. It certainly does not make any difference to anybody else ever, certainly not”51—who makes light of “liking the fascists” enough to share mailed-­in corn seeds with them52—later assures her friends that all corn she plants is “allied corn,”53 takes pride in reading Ernie Pyle’s Here Is Your War (1943),54 and exults in maquis victories. She verbally tussles with ­Vichy advocates in her local village as France’s liberation draws nearer. After describing the maquisards as carrying out “Robin Hood activities” that are “exciting,”55 Stein turns her attention to those who couldn’t agree less with this view: “And then there are the decayed aristocrats, who are always hoping that a new regime will give them a chance and they are the most furious of all against the defeat of the Germans they and the decayed bourgeoisie, who feel sure that everybody but themselves should be disciplined.”56 She goes on a few lines down: “I used not to understand but I am beginning to now. The feeling is that all that makes for liberty and liveliness is against those that either by weakness or by strength want to suppress the others and so the Germans who are the Germans who are the arch-­disciplinarians because both of their weakness and their strength they want to stop liberty so those others who want liberty suppressed because liberty is a criticism of them are pro-­German.”57 The French are divided, and so is she, not least by France’s po­liti­cal divisions. “Sometimes I wonder,” Stein muses at one point, “was Kansas before the civil war like it is in France to-­day and like during the revolutionary like it was described by Fenimore Cooper in The Spy, everybody denouncing friends and enemies, everybody being hidden in the mountains, patriots false patriots, bandits making believe being real or false patriots, the trains being blown up and now the French say it is being done by the Germans to make the French angry with each other.”58 A little under fifty pages later, Stein ruefully states, “The death of Henriot killed by the militia or somebody in their uniform has been an immense excitement, it is hard to make any one who has not lived with them realise how really tormented the population has been in its opinions and Henriot did perhaps more than any­body to turn Frenchmen against Frenchmen, he was a very able propagand­ist, he used the method not of a politician but of a church48



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man, he had that education, and he knew how to appeal like a revivalist sermon, and he did do it awfully well, and he held the middle classes they could not get away from him.”59 By Henriot, she means Philippe Henriot, the Vichy Secretary of State for Information. As Pétain’s propaganda chief, Henriot was assassinated by maquisards around two months before Paris’s liberation, but his popu­larity was such that thousands paid their respects at his state funeral. Faced with such inconsistencies—a France holding its breath for Germany’s retreat versus a France enthralled by the aggressor’s totalitarian rhetoric—Stein chooses to end her career with The Mother of Us All (1947), an opera libretto much referenced by critics for upholding Susan B. ­Anthony’s suffragist cause. Alongside the question of Pétain’s evolving image as a belatedly apprehended liability, there is also the matter of lip service. Stein’s attempt to translate his war speeches remains so out of character that Faÿ’s influence must be, at least in no small part, assumed. Given her history of struggling with collaborative projects, it seems highly improbable that she was ever serious about translating Pétain. The entire task appears doomed from its inception, a means of (mostly) humoring Faÿ under pressure. All her efforts to enlist Thornton Wilder’s help on Ida: A Novel or Sherwood Anderson, Lloyd Lewis, and Louis Bromfield for vari­ous forays into biographical and detective writing never came to anything.60 The first opera she jointly created with Virgil Thomson, Four Saints in Three Acts (1934), hit stages only after years of haggling over royalties, production details, and credit. While he arranged the score, she worked on the libretto from 1927 to 1928. All work came to a standstill from 1930 to 1933, however, when Stein cut off communication with Thomson. A reconciliation was reached only through Stein’s literary agent William Aspenwall Bradley’s painstaking labors. The tone of the letters exchanged between Stein, Bradley, and Thomson at the time is strained. Speaking through Bradley, Stein comes across as mulish in her insistence that she be accorded half of all profits and equal ownership of the musical score (her reason being that she helped financially support Thomson during its composition), an unusual demand considering that the onus of mounting Four Saints fell entirely to Thomson and that lyricists rarely received as much as composers by custom.61 If the above examples illustrate the challenges of working with Stein when she has full rein over her subject matter, one can imagine what happens when she loses that option, reduced to the translator’s subsidiary role. Hugnet’s translation, as mentioned in the opening chapter, culminated in chaos. In Gertrude Stein: The Language That Rises, 1923–1934 (2003), Ulla E. Dydo charts Stein’s falling-­out with Hugnet in detail. From 1928

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to 1929, Stein herself translated excerpts from The Making of Ameri­cans into French for publication in Hugnet’s self-­financed press Les Editions de la Montagne. Hugnet afterward (very lightly) proofread Stein’s French, which was deliberately unidiomatic, and greenlit it for printing. Translating Hugnet’s Enfances all through­out 1930 as a return favor, Stein eventually considered her efforts to be origi­nal poetic reflections on his poetry. For her renditions were either so literal as to be grammatically nonsensical in her trademark fashion or digressive in content. When no resolution could be reached before her demands for equal billing on the title page of their planned volume, their friendship was over by 1931. Even if one ignores how Stein’s Pétain-­related manuscripts predate her rising enthusiasm for the French resistance, the creative liberties that Stein was so fond of taking, coupled with her general inability to finish collaborative enterprises of this sort, hint that Pétain never had a fighting chance of crossing the Atlantic. Not only would his Stein-­inflected English have been incomprehensible to the Ameri­can public, but the words themselves would have never been finalized. The issue of Stein’s nominating Hitler for a Nobel and her later Nazi salute, as Language poet Charles Bernstein makes abundantly clear in Gertrude Stein’s War Years: Setting the Record Straight (2012), an edited feature for the online magazine Jacket2, remains a classic case study in media distortion. Stein never actually contacted the Nobel Prize committee on Hitler’s behalf. All she did was comment in a 1934 New York Times interview that “Hitler ought to have the peace prize because he is removing all elements of contest and struggle from Germany. By driving out the Jews and the democratic and Left elements, he is driving out everything that conduces to activity. That means peace.”62 That such lifeless peace is not to be aspired to is clarified in her later remarks from the same article: When I say government does not matter, I do not mean that it cannot have bad effects. I mean that any form of government may be good, and any form of government may be bad. What matters is competition, struggle, interest, activity that keeps a people alive and excited in accordance with the instincts which best provide excitement for the in­di­vidual people. Building a Chinese wall is always bad. Protection, paternalism and suppression of natural activity and competition lead to dullness and stagnation. It is true in politics, in literature, in art. Everything in life needs constant stimulation. It needs activity, new blood. [. . .]. That is the reason why I do not approve of the stringent immigration laws in America today. We need the stimulation of new blood. It is best



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to favor healthy competition. There is no reason why we should not select our immigrants with greater care, nor why we should not bar certain peoples and preserve the color line for instance. But if we shut down on immigration completely we shall become stagnant. The French may not like the competition of foreigners, but they let them in. They accept the challenge and derive the stimulus. I am surprised that there is not more discussion of immigration in the United States than there is. We have got rid of prohibition restrictions, and it seems to me the next thing we should do is to relax the severity of immigration restrictions.63

Activity, struggle, and the energy emanating from new immigrants (putting aside her expected penchant for Jews and Caucasians) all become vital wards against Hitler’s sinister peace program. Similarly misunderstood is a 1945 photograph featuring Stein, alongside seven GIs, mock-­saluting after the Nazis on Hitler’s Berchtesgaden balcony. As part of Life’s “Off We All Went to See Germany” (August 6, 1945), an antifascist essay contributed by Stein herself, the picture is clearly meant to be ironic. It accompanies, after all, long tracts where Stein ruminates on the evils of autocratic thought and superpower nationalism with those “doughboys” around her: That evening I went over to talk to the soldiers, and to hear what they had to say, we all got very excited, Sergeant Santiani who had asked me to come complained that I confused the minds of his men but why shouldn’t their minds be confused, gracious goodness, are we going to be like the Germans, only believe in the Aryans that is our own race, a mixed race if you like but all having the same point of view. [. . .] Well said one of them after all we are on top. Yes I said and is there any spot on earth more dangerous than on top. You don’t like the Latins, or the Arabs or the Wops, or the British, well don’t you forget a country can’t live without friends, I want you all to get to understand other countries so that you can be friends, make a little effort, try to find out what it is all about.64

One can debate the taste (or lack thereof ) behind these moments—whether Hitler and his army can be bantered about thus—but such concerns hardly render Stein a Nazi sympathizer in any sense of the word.65 As her definitive biographer Linda Wagner-­Martin elucidates, Stein even took up the habit of calling Hitler “that madman in Germany” as WWII deepened.66 When one of Stein’s later Ameri­can friends, CBS news journalist Eric Sevareid, quizzed her regarding her prewar belief that Hitler remained harmless, she ignored him. The conversation flowed on. As he reminisces

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in his memoir Not So Wild a Dream (1946), “Miss Stein hesitated only a moment, then went on with the thread of her conversation, pretending not to have heard me.”67 Indeed, what answer could suffice here? When Sevareid first made her acquaintance, he was a young war correspondent assigned to Paris right before the Second World War’s outbreak. Dropping by the rue Christine one day with an introduction in hand, he was struck by how Stein’s “remarkably lucid and germinal mind,” one that “disguised a profound understanding by a simplicity of rapidly flowing speech that misleads the casual listener,”68 could simultaneously harbor an incredible po­liti­cal callowness: “Like most artists she thought in terms of the human in­di­vidual and was quite lost when she considered people in groups. She could not think po­liti­cally at all. Thus she assured me: ‘Hitler will never really go to war. He is not the dangerous one. You see, he is the German romanticist. He wants the illusion of victory of power, the glory and glamour of it, but he could not stand the blood and fighting involved in getting it. No, Mussolini—there’s the dangerous man, for he is an Italian realist. He won’t stop at anything.’ She did not understand Fascism; she did not understand that the moods and imperatives of great mass movements are far stronger and more important than the individuals involved in them. She knew persons, but not people.”69 As her later silence on Hitler suggests, her feelings regarding Nazi Germany—even her own credibility as a po­liti­ cal pundit—changed. When Sevareid greeted her a sec­ond time years later, he discerned the war’s toll on her. “Gertrude greeted us with a shout and a bearhug,” he writes. “The iron-­gray hair was still closely cropped, and the small eyes were as direct and searching as before, but she was just a trifle more bent, a trifle heavier in her walk. Alice B. Toklas—‘Pussy’—was still soft, small, and warmly murmurous, but also a little more bowed.”70 They reunited in Culoz. In the French liberation’s wake, Sevareid just barely tracked Stein down for an interview. Her experiences, he gathered, alternated between terror, disillusionment, grateful commiseration with the ­local peasantry, and a belated appreciation for democracy: She said that not everything about Vichy had been so bad. Many of the lower civil servants, like the mayor of Culoz, were perfectly wonderful. Gertrude had a faint tone of sorrow that Pétain had turned out so miserably, and she said it was when he let the Germans round up the young men for service in Germany that the people really turned against the old man. Laval was unspeakable, and for Darnand’s vicious Gestapo not even Gertrude had adequate words. The mayor had always protected her secret from the Germans and so had all the people of the village, who knew per-



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fectly well who and what she was. When the Germans began rounding up enemy aliens, the mayor simply forgot to tell them about the Stein household, because, he said to Gertrude, “you are obviously too old for life in a concentration camp. You would not survive it, so why should I tell them?”71

Stein’s play Yes Is for a Very Young Man (1944–45) likewise shows off Stein the underground sympathizer at her most full-­blooded. Contrary to Will’s allegation that the script feels “morally ambiguous,”72 it isn’t ambiguous in the least. The plot revolves around the Ameri­can Constance (another one of Stein’s alter egos) and her local neighbors, the two brothers Ferdinand and Henry. Their collective unease before the armistice, then gradual siege, becomes a microcosm for France’s confusion as a whole before Germany’s invasion. All agree that the situation is terrible but cannot come to an agreement on the means for resolution. Juxtaposed against Henry’s wife, the blue-­blooded (if financially pinched) Denise, who provides comic relief with her hysterical Pétainism, Constance, Ferdinand, and Henry seem to voice the nation’s conscience from 1940 till 1944. The only supporters Pétain holds on to are Denise, who personifies the “decayed aristocrat” type Stein found so aggravating in Wars I Have Seen, and her brother, the mindlessly obedient WWI hero Achille. As for the rest, Henry hurls these insults when Denise nags at him to join Pétain’s troops following the armistice: “I would just as leave vomit as join Marshal Pe­tain’s army. You make me sick with your Achille, Achille, Achille. [. . .] Can’t you remember that while Marshal Petain is forming that miserable little army of one hundred and twenty-­five thousand men, that miserable little toy army, my two brothers are rotting in prison in Germany with two million of your fellow countrymen, if you can’t remember my brothers you can remember them.”73 To clarify, Denise’s reasoning goes no further than Achille’s steady salary in this bereft time. But moving on, even Ferdinand’s moderate response to Henry’s disgust retains barbs for the Maréchal: “I am not like some, I do think the Marshal has helped France by making his armistice, but an armistice is not peace, it is a truce and as long as there is no peace we are at war with Germany even if we are not fighting and an army is just silly, an army that is not supposed at any time to fight against Germany. It is just silly. No, Henry is right, he should not join a silly army like that.”74 While Stein gives Henry the last word here—“And you might add, Ferdinand, to be an army under the Marshal who lets our two brothers rot in prison in Germany while he makes a toy army that can never fight for them”75—the play’s broader appeal isn’t pro-­or anti-­resistance, but how to resist. In the process of absorbing this unspoken question, C ­ onstance,

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Ferdinand, and Henry wander through existential land mines that rest on the premise “there are so many points of view in a Frenchman, of course he cannot agree with any other Frenchman but he cannot even agree with himself inside him that is to say with the other Frenchman which is him.”76 These words belong to Ferdinand, and they reaffirm those sentiments reverberating through­out Wars I Have Seen. To obey the Maréchal’s orders to labor in Germany, to disobey by joining the resistance, to compromise that very revolt’s moral integrity by committing acts of barbarism that rival Germany’s own (the play’s maquisards shoot a dimwitted “Etienne” for no other reason than that he verbally insults them), to join Pétain’s “toy army,” to love across po­liti­cal lines like Henry and Denise—every step against the enemy (and that enemy is always German for Stein) falls on slippery ground within beleaguered France.

i Accompanying those accusations of Stein’s Nazi fascism are speculations that what enabled her to befriend Faÿ and his ilk was her lack of Jewish self-­ identification. Such conjectures prompt, in turn, two responses: 1) they are false, especially given the range of ways all identity politics are expressed at the in­di­vidual level; and 2) even if they were true, Stein’s failure to relate to, and display sufficient sympathy with, a persecuted minority (that she is well aware she belongs to) remains a negligible offense—fodder for restaurant gossip at best. What, indeed, would suffice as an appropriate degree of solidarity anyway? (One wonders what Stein’s critics envision as the ideal here: Stein proudly flaunting a gold star back then or placing a gold star next to every mention of Stein’s name today as punishment for, as Leon Katz wryly puts it, not “bravely and publicly denouncing Fay for getting her into this evil, evil business, bravely and publicly denouncing Petain as well, and so inviting her own deportation and demise”?77 If Stein is to be judged from the safe distance of academic chairs or personal couches, moreover, then what of those Jews who committed much worse both in and out of the camps to survive?) The assumption that only victims cut from the same cloth as Levi, Elie Wiesel, Charlotte Delbo, or Anne Frank can be taken seriously from this his­tori­cal moment remains laughably p ­ ious. It attempts to quantify loss, a vulgar exercise when undertaken in a purely academic setting, that is, when divorced from either real-­time disaster relief or compensation for injuries. To begin with the first issue, though, Stein very much saw herself as a Jew and took pride in her Jewish heritage.78 Of Stein’s last pieces, Lucy Daniel helpfully points out, “Stein has been seen as not identifying enough



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with her Jewish heritage. It is very hard to make such judgements. If any of her comments seem crass, they are clearly also a front. Stein was never one to give a typical reaction. Her lifelong attitude to adversity was optimism, but it was in her writing that her true feelings were played out.”79 Although tempered by the apprehensive mood reigning Wars I Have Seen, the optimism that Daniel alludes to slips out when Stein muses, “Although Shakespeare is right [about the meaninglessness of life], we all do hope again”80 or “Dear Life is strife Claribel used to say, but she did say dear life and in any way it is and she did say life is strife but is it.”81 The same optimism characterizes her attitude toward Judaism. Despite thinking through her own Jewishness in clichés (a habit carried over from her psychic automatism experiments and taste for Otto Weininger’s sweeping char­ac­tero­logi­cal assessments), these clichés are largely flattering. She belonged to the new Jewish Ameri­can intellectual elite: secular, well-­to-­do, well traveled, and educated on the East Coast. Experiencing her Jewishness in ethnic rather than religious terms, Stein associated Judaism with genius. Jews were, for her, the chosen people, people of the book—thirsty for learning and cultural refinement, even if given over to a crass materialism at their worst. As she argues in an undergraduate essay, “The Modern Jew Who Has Given Up the Faith of His Fathers Can Reasonably and Consistently Believe in Isolation” (1896), marrying outside the Jewish community would even dilute Jews’ inherent “brain-­power.”82 This communal feeling of hers persisted into the Second World War, when Stein discouraged Paul Genin, a Lyon silk manufacturer who lent her money in times of need, from adopting a Jewish orphan due to Genin’s Gentile background. She was adamant that a Jewish home be arranged for the child. Malcolm, who unearths this story, views Stein as momentarily relapsing into the Jewish pride of her youth here. Barring Toklas and her eldest brother Michael’s family, the adult Stein mostly favored Gentile society in Malcolm’s estimation.83 But Stein enjoyed the company of many Jewish friends through­out her life. Axelrod even compiles a sample list of Stein’s Jewish acquaintances in an exasperated response to Malcolm’s reading: Nathan Asch, Bernard Berenson, Mary Berenson, Henri Bergson, Eugène Berman, Bennett Cerf, Claribel Cone, Etta Cone, Aaron Copland, Andrew Dasburg, Jo Davidson, Martha Gellhorn, Daniel-­Henry Kahnweiler, Harriet Levy, Harold Loeb, Mina Loy, Elie Nadelman, Maurice Sterne, Alfred Stieglitz, and cousins David Bachrach, Fanny Bachrach, Bird Stein, Dolene Guggenheimer, and Simon Stein.84 When the Jewish Max Jacob died of pneumonia in a detention camp at Drancy, Stein penned heartfelt eulogies for him in the blacklisted literary magazines Confluences and Aquédal.85 When Steward first

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v­ isited Stein’s Bilignin home in 1937, he confessed how he didn’t much take to his sojourn in England. The English, he felt, treated him as an inferior, a slight that Steward smarted under as a small town boy from Ohio. Stein consoled him by way of the following anecdote: “Do you have any British blood in you,” Gertrude asked. “I’m part Scot,” I said. “Ah, there you have it,” Gertrude said. “If you have a single drop of British blood in you, you’re thought inferior. A mongrel. The higher classes consider you so and the lower classes think you’re inferior to their upper. Now I, I am a Jew, orthodox background, and I never make any bones about it. So in England I had a wonderful time when I went for the Cambridge lectures because no one expected me to be anything but a Jew and I could say what I pleased, even before I was I.” She rocked a few extra times in her rocker, which she did to emphasize her point, and laughed—her rich, hearty laugh flowing out into the night of Ain.86

The issue of Stein’s Jewishness surfaces again during a conversation Steward shares with Toklas in late 1950s Paris. In response to Toklas’s venturing that Stein would have been “fascinated” by Steward’s insights regarding why people tattoo themselves, Steward responds with: “It might have depended on how orthodox she was.”87 (Orthodox Judaism forbids tattooing.) This remark prompts Toklas’s “Completely, but of course she didn’t practice it at all.”88 Toklas would eventually convert to Catholicism, a religion Stein found “not really interesting” from her “exclusively Jewish background” for its attempts to “solve” an “incomprehensible” world,89 but such is the irony of love. In her final years, Toklas sought a solution to what Stein deemed unsolvable: human loss. Let it be known, however, that the elderly Toklas still entrusted many of Stein’s secrets, specifically the content of Stein’s private notebooks, to then-­graduate student Leon Katz (the very same critic mentioned earlier), a Jew. (Why Malcolm underplays this exchange when discussing Stein’s cultural affiliations remains a mystery.) Stein’s Judaism cannot be extricated from her Ameri­canness. Her early opinion that one was “a Jew first and an Ameri­can only afterwards”90 erodes during Hitler’s reign. The two identities lose their oppositional flavor. This blurring most likely accounts for why Stein felt relatively disconnected from European Jewry and its fate. In The Continual Pilgrimage: ­Ameri­can Writers in Paris, 1944–1960 (1992), Christopher Sawyer-­Lauçanno cites Thom­son as having said:



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Just as Gertrude kept up friendships among the Amazons, though she did not share their lives, she held certain Jews in attachment for their family-­ like warmth, though she felt no solidarity with Jewry. Tristan Tzara . . . she said was “like a cousin.” Miss Etta and Dr. Claribel Cone, picture buyers and friends from Baltimore days, she handled almost as if they were her sisters. The sculptors Jo Davidson and Jacques Lipschitz, the painter Man Ray she accepted as though they had a sec­ond cousin’s right to be part of her life. About men or goyim, even about her oldest man friend, Picasso, she could feel unsure; but a woman or a Jew she could size up quickly. She accepted without cavil, indeed, all the conditionings of her Jewish background. And if, as she would boast, she was a “bad Jew,” she at least did not think of herself as a Christian.91

Thomson’s observation that Stein “felt no solidarity with Jewry” can be taken, of course, with a grain of salt (Thomson conveniently forgets he counts as one of the male goyim whom Stein “could feel unsure” about), but the point itself raises a further one: self-­identification is not synonymous with group solidarity. The former doesn’t necessarily usher in the latter. Yes, Stein saw herself as a Jew, but of a very different sort than, say, the humbly born Russian Chagall, who was no stranger to pogroms while growing up. Stein was an assimilated bourgeois Jewish Ameri­can writer of stature. The Californian in her helps grease along casual conversations with newly appointed Vichy guards in Wars I Have Seen. The Californian also adopts a breathtaking nonchalance toward a series of home invasions: “So a few weeks ago we had here in the house first the German officers and then later on the Italians. It is funny to be Ameri­cans and to be here in France and to have that.”92 On such occasions (and there are more than a few), Stein is an Ameri­can first, a Jew sec­ond. Once Ameri­can troops entered the area, Stein and Toklas were among the most eager to welcome them as, to their repeated insistence, fellow Ameri­ cans. The couple actively sought out Ameri­can soldiers and invited them over for nibbles, with Stein half-­nervously introducing herself as an Ameri­ can personality. As Wars I Have Seen draws to a close, Stein rejoices in being an Ameri­can surrounded by Ameri­cans on French soil. Ecstatic at the prospect of peace, Stein enthuses over her love of Ameri­can geography. Each GI she meets is from a different state. Each state possesses its own terrain and culture. All of these differences have become “poetry” and “music” for her. It is not a stretch to say that Wars I Have Seen is a love letter to the Ameri­can army and national character, which have, Stein be-

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lieves, saved Europe in its darkest hour. Ergo, her seemingly boundless patriotic fervor: “There is something in this native land business and you cannot get away from it, in peace time you do not seem to notice it much particularly when you live in foreign parts but when there is a war and you are all alone and completely cut off from knowing about your country well then there it is, your native land is your native land, it certainly is.”93 The French likewise viewed Stein in these terms—as a privileged Ameri­ can first and foremost. Her French was marked by an Ameri­can accent (“The wife of the mayor was all through telling me the story, she said you know I think he was an Englishman, sometimes his French reminded me of yours”94). Georges Monnet, the onetime Minister of Blockade for Paul Reynaud, deferentially greeted Stein and Toklas as the “mesdemoiselles ameri­caines” at the village Virieu-­le-­Grand’s agricultural fair held during the summer of 1939.95 Is it any wonder that Stein, by virtue of her very Ameri­can­ness, was somewhat emotionally insulated from the anti-­Semitic ex­tremi­ties beclouding Pétain’s France? As mentioned at this chapter’s outset, Stein’s aggressively flaunting her Ameri­can national identity served a strategic purpose as well: to distance herself from the Jewishness that could be a death sentence in Nazi Europe. For even Stein’s Ameri­can passport and social standing crumbled against the Vichy government’s Jewish penal schemes. Steward shares Stein’s fears for her own safety when Germany invades France. At Bilignin together at the time, Steward inquires whether she and Toklas will be free from harm after his upcoming departure. “Never mind about us, we’ll be all right,” Stein replies, “The peasants will hide us if necessary. We are just going to set it out, it may be dangerous but we have almost decided that’s what we’re going to do.”96 She was not wrong. The locals did protect her. But the conversation continues: “But the pictures in Paris!” I said. “The Germans will take them all!” Gertrude turned almost completely around and even in the dark I could see her wink. “We are going back there secretly if war comes and bundle some of them up and bring them here.” “Oh my god,” I said. “If Paris falls and the Germans find you, they’ll kill you for sure. You should just stay here and eat things from your garden.” “I had rather be killed for a Picasso than a tomato,” Gertrude said.97

Stein’s legendary chutzpah flashes here, yet both sides understand the stakes involved. Steward moves on to admit how Stein’s resolution to stay falters as her living situation deteriorates. She grows desperate enough



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to even contemplate escaping to Hollywood and adapting The Autobiog­ raphy of Alice B. Toklas into a film. Steward’s recollections bare the degree to which Stein underplayed her wartime anxieties in print. One must remember that she was composing in the throes of war, and that she died the year following Germany’s surrender. There was no time to reflect in the luxury of hindsight. While Stein was handwriting Wars I Have Seen, Toklas was paranoid enough to refrain from typesetting the origi­nal manuscript. Both avoided specifying their religion and assets on Ameri­can repatriation forms. As Stein raises the possibility that the Germans might intercept such sensitive information (“The Ameri­can authorities say they are in a hurry for these facts but I imagine that all Ameri­cans will feel the same better keep quiet until the Germans are gone just naturally play possum just as long as one can”98), she goes out of her way to frame this distinctly Jewish concern in Ameri­can terms. For such practical reasons, but also for personal ones, Stein did not publicize her Jewishness on paper. Nor did she devote her literature to narratives of Judaic self-­fashioning. Aside from her heightened Ameri­can ties, there was the matter of simple anxiety. Stein, her biographer John Malcolm Brinnin reports, was so superstitious that she was afraid of jinxing herself by naming her fears—here, the fear of anti-­Semitic violence and of losing her treasures in Paris.99 Silence was her refuge. An art of deflections, constant deferrals, euphemisms, and distractions transpired. When Stein mentions, “And now it is the first of De­cem­ber 1943 and everybody is cross just as cross as they can be and there is a reason why,”100 she cannot bring herself to cite this reason. She spots trains heading to and from East­ern Europe, but remains quiet regarding their passengers. The closest she ventures to hinting at their identities is when she describes a group dressed in overcoats and carrying suitcases. They are boarding freight cars earmarked for an unknown destination: “They told us they were young men and girls that had been rounded up in Annecy and were being taken well somewhere, did they have any reason for being taken, well probably and where were they being taken nobody ever does know.”101 These “young men and girls” are almost certainly Jewish, yet Stein cannot bear to say so outright. Her instinct for self-­denial likewise manifests itself after she encounters a potential Nazi during a walk: “He had bright blue eyes and a large nose and was very sun burned and had the button of the legion of honor and another decoration that I could not make out [. . .] he said in English [Basket] is a good doggie and I said in French no he is not dangerous, and it did seem to me that he emphasized the last e in doggie and what naturally did that make him [. . .] I came home and I asked Alice Toklas what

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she thought about it but naturally there was nothing to think about, there never is, no there never is.”102 The author’s principal method of digesting occupied France’s systematized anti-­Semitism appears to have been avoidance. She usually omits overt allusions to the Jewish question, diverting herself with anecdotes regarding the French character, gardening, long walks, naps, and the woes of local youth drafted into Germany’s workforce. Stein discourages herself from dwelling too long or deeply upon events beyond her control. Conversations revolving around Hitler or the war at large tend to invite self-­interruptions such as “But let’s talk about something else, maybe literature, did you like Thornton, really now”103—rarely in-­depth analy­sis. Only after Ameri­can soldiers secure Culoz can Stein concede the truth: trepidation defined her war years. In her own words, [The Ameri­cans] used all of them to want to know how we managed to escape the Germans and gradually with their asking and with the news that in the month of August the Gestapo had been in my apartment in Paris to look at everything, naturally I began to have what you might call a posthumous fear. I was quite frightened. All the time the Germans were here we were so busy trying to live through each day that except once in a while when something happened you did not know about being frightened, but now somehow with the Ameri­can soldiers questions and hearing what had been happening to others, of course one knew it but now one had time to feel it and so I was quite frightened, now that there was nothing dangerous and the whole Ameri­can army between us and danger.104

Bustling about in the face of immediate threats fixed Stein to the moment. No energy could be spared for introspection. And rationalizations bolstered such self-­imposed ignorance. Omissions branched out into plain lies when Stein boasted how a new batch of German recruits were not as intimidating as their predecessors were or that the French held a united front. One of France’s most glaring internal divisions, its anti-­Semitism, she brushed past. Beyond a defense mechanism for containing Stein’s fears, the author’s reticence about her Jewish background had not a little to do with Stein’s conception of literary greatness. Rightly or wrongly, she deemed publicizing her Jewishness a dangerous invitation to be removed from the pantheon of great male authors and classics. Her self-­consciousness regarding the prospect of being pigeonholed as a minority author was acute enough that she substituted the adjectives “German” and “middle-­class” for “Jewish” in her earliest drafts of The Making of Ameri­cans.105 Even as she scat-



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tered in oblique Jewish references—“Yet Dish”’s (1913) sly Yiddish allusions; the plea “I would have you sing songs to your little Jew” in “A Sona­tina Followed by Another” (composed 1921);106 To Do’s family of O’s that possesses birthdays (a birthright), but no home—Stein refused to market herself as a Jewish writer. To do so would be to marginalize herself, she held fast. Toklas’s defensiveness during a 1952 interview reiterates Stein’s view: Duncan: Do you think possibly that [Stein] felt that there was any cultural or religious minority which would have set her apart— Toklas: No. Duncan: —perhaps made her strive toward certain social or cultural objectives? None at all? Toklas: Never. We never had any feeling of any minority. We weren’t the minority. We represented America.107 Toklas is lying, naturally. Stein and she both smarted under the brunt of anti-­Semitism all through­out their lives, never mind how insidious. (In private, Hemingway, for one, was well known for casually insulting Stein from this angle, calling her one of “a lot of safe-­playing kikes” when she refused to review his first short story collection, In Our Time [1925].108) But Stein’s way of coping with such discrimination wasn’t to spotlight it in action. Instead, she took pains to lump herself with the creative geniuses of her time, all invariably male models whom everyone sought to emulate. But the most straightforward reason behind Stein’s abiding disinterest in delving into the perils of being a Jewish woman in either an investigative journalistic or realist style remained her personal taste. She wrote no novels or short stories from roughly 1910 to 1933, when The Autobiography of Alice B. Toklas entered bookstores. After Three Lives and The Making of Ameri­cans until this point, she possessed no interest in situating her characters in linear time, no matter how garbled or tenuously assembled, because the past and future held no philosophical import for her. Only the present, the very moment, beckoned. So we have her authorial technique christened “the continuous present,” which Stein, as discussed in chapter 3, defines as her unusual use of present progressives to capture the instant in which consciousness abides. From the 1930s onward, even as Stein retried her hand at stories (of­ten with a surrealist twist) and expanded her conceptual inquiries into historiography, she never went so far as to believe in a universally guaranteed his­tori­cal progress. History isn’t necessarily building up to anything. As chapters 5 and 6 will illustrate, history

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can go in cycles or may even be regressing in the West. To sum up, the subject of Jewish identity fails to receive extended treatment by Stein because Stein’s autobiographical writing deconstructs the genre’s formal parameters as such. Even at their most accessible, most of Stein’s fiction and nonfiction grind down the pillars of narrative convention. The who, what, when, where, and why we take for granted are just less there.

i Are Malcolm’s Two Lives and Will’s Unlikely Collaboration really that damning for Stein? Rereading both in 2020, have their instances of bad faith been misconstrued or exaggerated by critics and the general pub­lic alike? Malcolm, firstly, is not as judgmental as she is sometimes made out to be. For much of Two Lives consists of character profiles of those Ameri­ can academics who have devoted their lives to Stein’s biographical criticism: the selfsame Burns; Dydo; their research assistant, Rice; and Katz, whom Malcolm never meets in person, but hears about through the other three.109 At its heart, Two Lives is more than Stein and Toklas’s story. It is Malcolm’s story about the scholars who try to piece the couple’s life together, relayed in a generally sympathetic light. Malcolm admires Stein’s literature overall (“She seemed to shine when she walked into a room, and the work, even at its most hermetic, possesses a glitter that keeps one reading long past the time when it is normal to stop reading a text that makes no sense”110), while divulging a tendency to patronize her subject by relying too heavily on biographical speculation. She all too frequently takes fictional quotes as transparent insights into what the author thinks or feels. The Making of Ameri­cans, for instance, almost devolves into an author’s diary in Malcolm’s hands. Any remarks on Stein’s character flaws, conversely, are not directed so much at her potential fascism as to what Malcolm deems to be her internalized anti-­Semitism. The issue of Stein’s WWII allegiances enters the picture only insofar as Malcolm is interested in Stein’s identity politics. And she is very interested—too interested, in truth. Opening her book with an anecdote regarding gleaning cooking recipes from The Alice B. Toklas Cook Book (1954), Malcolm contemplates the tone that Toklas adopts when describing her culinary life under the Vichy regime in the following manner: When I had occasion to read this chapter again, I was struck by its evasiveness, no less than by its painfully forced gaiety. How had the pair of elderly Jewish lesbians escaped the Nazis? Why had they stayed in France instead of returning to the safety of the United States? Why did Toklas



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omit any mention of her and Stein’s Jewishness (never mind lesbianism)? Well, in the fifties one did not go out of one’s way to mention one’s Jewishness. Gentlemanly anti-­Semitism was still a fact of Ameri­can life. The fate of Europe’s Jews was known, but the magnitude of the catastrophe had not registered; the term “Holocaust” was not yet in use. In 1954, Toklas’s evasions went as unremarked as her recipes for A Restricted Veal Loaf and Swimming Crawfish went uncooked. Today, the evasions seem egregious, though hardly incomprehensible. What we now know about Stein’s and Toklas’s war makes it easy to see why the complex actuality of their situation and conduct found no place in The Alice B. Toklas Cook Book.111

Even as Malcolm is quick to add that she understands the couple’s pub­lic evasiveness regarding their Jewish background given its stigma—that such omissions constitute a defensive veneer before an anti-­Semitic world— her uneasiness on this subject never goes away. It only escalates as the book goes on. Even as Malcolm makes a point of referencing Burns, Dydo, and Rice’s aforementioned appendix article in order to ratify Stein’s anti-­ Hitler stance; even as she traces how Stein’s po­liti­cal sympathies shift from Franco, Pétain, and the French right-­wing group Croix de Feu to the Allied forces, too much of Two Lives lapses into dormitory chat about why Stein might have been a self-­hating Jew. Excerpts in the vein of “The rueful consternation of Dydo, Burns, and Rice and the sharp criticism Stein has received from less kindly disposed writers in regard to her apparent indifference to the fate of the Jews are not blunted by Wars I Have Seen. While she covertly identifies with the persecuted Jews, overtly she distances herself from them”112 can be easily dismissed by way of reminding ourselves that “overt” and “covert” are relative terms. One’s “overt” is another’s “covert,” and vice versa. Stein’s downplaying her personal hardships as a Jew hiding out in Vichy France also doesn’t mean, again, that she abjures her own Jewishness. As Renate Stendhal makes a point of mentioning, Jews such as Franz Kafka and Heinrich Heine “also didn’t declare their Jewishness in their work[,  .  .  .] [yet] they are not put on trial the way Stein is nowadays.”113 Are Jews who fail to publicly glorify their Jewish roots somehow betraying Jews everywhere? Smuggled into this question is the equally inane one of whether the writer is obligated to grapple with his or her age’s great moral dilemmas. Will’s Unlikely Collaboration has stirred significantly more furor over less. Unlike Malcolm, Will explicitly pronounces Stein a collaborator, even if an “unlikely” one,114 for supporting Hitler (a mistaken assertion on Will’s part); daring to shore up favors from the budding war criminal Faÿ; shar-

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ing his conservative streak, especially as manifested in a Jeffersonian-­style rustic idealism; approving of Pétain “for the first two and half years of the Vichy regime,”115 the living emblem of their mutual nostalgia for France’s past that never was; and translating some of Pétain’s speeches badly in private. Compared to the damage wrought by staunch informers, propagandists, and the milice, these charges appear slight, to say the least. With­out ever grappling with Pétain’s complicated status, Will curiously emphasizes Stein’s blunders at the expense of her far more substantial breakthroughs— her self-­atonements, her fundamental aversion to authoritarian rule. Un­ likely Collaboration acknowledges that Stein “never attended a fascist rally, was never an official functionary of any fascist organization,”116 and even grew disenchanted with Faÿ, but still somehow concludes that such fortunate lapses render her translation project all the more “troubling.”117 This paranoid logic is ironic given how much of Will’s text probes Faÿ’s paranoia. If Will’s first book, Gertrude Stein, Modernism, and the Problem of “Ge­ nius,” favorably aligns Stein’s evolving creative rhetoric with left-­wing identity politics, her sec­ond book feels like a crisis of faith. A devotee elevates the artist to such a degree that any blemish feels like the worst betrayal. With an unnerving casualness, Will’s sequel study intersperses “collaboration” and “collaborator” with a chorus of “yet” upon “yets.” All through­ out, she strives to have it both ways: to release quite serious character reassessments while hedging her bets by in­clud­ing a smattering of equally serious disclaimers. On one occasion Will goes so far as to assert, “The implication that Stein, while she was alive, saved Faÿ from extremism in his thinking and writing brings a new twist to their relationship. It suggests that however much their po­liti­cal views ran parallel during the interwar period, their collaboration was also kept in check by countervailing tendencies, especially on the part of Stein, toward democratic, liberal, and ‘enlightened’ ways of thinking. [. . .] Only Stein seemed capable of reassessing after the war—however tentatively—her wartime actions and views. For Faÿ, it is clear, there was no going back.”118 Such insights, however, fail to deter Will from circling around her ever-­increasing disappointment with her luminary. Every time Will recognizes the small-­scale nature of Stein’s Pétainism (not to be conflated with Nazism), she shifts the weight elsewhere. Stein, she recounts, relied on prophecies to understand France’s defeat, but nowhere does Will mention that the author wished for the nation’s comeback by the same prophetic logic. Both the Hitler salute and 1934 New York Times interview are taken out of context. Stein’s unpublished Pétain translations are hyped, but their contents are glossed over (for good reason, as Václav Paris explains in “‘Gertrude Stein’s Translations



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of Speeches’ by Philippe Petain” [2012], since their explicitly anti-­Semitic messages account for virtually nil119). One speeds through Mrs. Reynolds and barely grazes the “gray zone” (or what doesn’t fit with Will’s thesis) in Wars I Have Seen, whose politics are taken to be “largely reactionary”120 for reflecting a garden-­variety Ameri­can nationalism. Similarly tone-­deaf readings circulate for Stein’s 1946 Socratic-­style dialogue Brewsie and Willie, “The Winner Loses,” and Yes Is for a Very Young Man. Brewsie and Willie is written off as “an uneasy mix of patriotism and reactionary criticism”121 for being unreceptive to communist and New Deal politics. Aside from the mildness of these so-­called shortcomings, why Will omits the text’s caveats against industrial capitalism, Ameri­can isolationism, nuclear arms, and wholesale ruralization remains fuzzy. Its sixth chapter even snapshots GIs worrying over both the unsustainable mining of iron ore and the hard truth that “we cant [sic] all be farmers.”122 That Stein entertains the possibility that labor strikes might be legitimized further waters down Will’s image of her as a borderline fascist: Do you know, said Pauline with great solemnity, you know that Stein woman who says things. [. . .] Well she said America that is the United States of America is the oldest country in the world because she went into the twentieth century in eighteen ninety [. . .] Well, said Janet, do you think then it is kind of right and a mighty good thing they are striking over home and not working, kind of tough on everybody not earning anything but since all the countries want us to work and use up our raw material just to give them things. It’s perhaps all right that they are striking. [. . .] But, said Jane, aint [sic] it a little bit cutting off your nose to spite your face. Well why do you mind that sister, said Willie, why you so old-­fashioned.123

Stein sports the leisure to poke fun at herself and Ameri­can conservatism here. “The Winner Loses” is described by Will as one of the most egregious “propaganda pieces Stein wrote for Vichy,”124 but the essay merely glides through certain silver linings to what Stein experiences as a nerve-­ racking situation (building character, getting more in touch with nature, saving French lives from field combat, earning a grace period from full-­ blown war). It doesn’t welcome the Third Republic’s fall, only notes its loss of popu­larity for failing to fend off Germany’s advances. The accent isn’t on Vichy’s potential (although Stein’s tone emanates an indifference that would be hard to re-­create later), but on how the official winner, Germany, has lost in numbers as well as mettle. The Germans, to Stein’s knowledge, lost more men proportionally to the fighting. They have also fallen prey to

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the complacency that easy victories bring. Composed around four years after “The Winner Loses,” Yes Is for a Very Young Man continues this theme of rebuilding and deliverance. “France is a country that can be beaten but not conquered, that can be a phoenix and rise from the ashes,” Ferdinand declares.125 Given Stein’s growing animosity toward pro-­Vichy conservatives (especially among the French gentry) and rapport with her local resistance network at the time, Ferdinand’s remains the position the play privileges. Lopsided criti­cal and his­tori­cal references complement Will’s liberal interpretation of reactionism. When Will writes, “Recent critics have fixated their attention upon the unlikelihood of a friendship between ‘the anti-­ Semite’ and ‘the Jew,’”126 only one example is listed, and incorrectly at that: Malcolm’s Two Lives admits that such friendships are commonplace. Every Jew known personally is a “good” one, while the rest fall under the “bad.” Even Pétain hustled to save favored Jewish acquaintances as he approved anti-­Semitic legislation. More seriously, without offering a range of citations, Will states at one point, “While some critics have truly bent over backward to argue otherwise, most have felt that the complex story of Stein’s wartime support for an authoritarian regime cannot be simply explained away.”127 No apologists, as Will would conceive them, are quoted. The purported majority troubled by Stein’s wartime loyalties boils down to a single entry: Liesl M. Olson’s article “Gertrude Stein, William James, and Habit in the Shadow of War” (2003), which specifically states its “intention is not first and foremost to denounce Gertrude Stein’s real life choices—which have been well documented already and are unquestionably problematic—­ but to look closely at how habit functions in her writings and to examine the consequences of what she learns from William James.”128 Such sleights of hand multiply in Will’s his­tori­cal narratives. Not only does Will keep conflating Pétainism with Vichy partisanship and Nazism, she downplays the French resistance’s motley po­liti­cal affinities (its members belonged to all parties) and Stein’s ideological evolution, as well as the implications of her own efforts to clarify Pétain’s place in world history. Unlikely Collaboration’s fourth chapter takes the trouble of contextualizing Pétain’s widespread support at the Vichy state’s inauguration and those tensions mounting between communists and Catholic monarchists during the interwar years yet paints Stein as a die-­hard anomaly by its end because she never recanted her opinion that the armistice had been a strategic victory (which isn’t synonymous with endorsing its oppressive aftermath). Nor did Stein ever cease granting Pétain the benefit of the doubt. But more alarming than Will’s soft-­pedaling through Pétain’s ambiguous legacy is her insinuation that Stein remained in Nazi territory due to her fascist



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sympathies. Preempting the question “Why did Stein, unlike so many other Jews, choose to remain in a situation that was clearly life threatening?”129 is the more fundamental one: why didn’t all European Jews leave for else­where as soon as Hitler’s atrocities became pub­lic knowledge? Stein proved naive in her decision to stay put, but no more or less so than everyone else who did the same until it was too late. Will underestimates the powers of rationalization that have fueled countless Holocaust studies on victim psychology. It is far from easy to leave behind everything built up over a lifetime for a friendless destination about which nothing may be known. The emotional and financial stakes involved are nothing short of traumatic. For the in­di­vidual to believe that he or she, regardless of socioeconomic status, could be the target of government-­sanctioned mass murders remains just as difficult. What is most riveting in Will’s sec­ond book is her biographical research on Faÿ himself. For Faÿ, Stein came across as an asexually masculine (and thus attractively homoerotic) presence. Plus, her patriotic appreciation for earthbound traditions in her adopted homeland ameliorated the problem of her Jewishness. There is also, as previously mentioned, their shared love of eighteenth-­century Jeffersonian America. For the royalist Faÿ, this Ameri­ can dream translated into peasants going about their business under the benevolent patronage of the Catholic upper classes; for Stein, gentlemen farmers pioneering across vast tracts of space and time. Besides extrapolating fascism from Stein’s vague agrarian fancies, Will’s study devotes itself to Stein’s unsavory sides—that part of the author given over to ego; entitlement; admitting, then abandoning lackeys; group politics; and winning at all costs. So Stein could be naive, ignorant, and insensitive during a global crisis of faith. She could utter the most cringeworthy comments. “Now in Sep­ tem­ber 1943 I am beginning to like trains again [. . .] all the old delight in trains comes back,”130 for instance, or “I perfectly understand why the French [. . .] prefer trains, trains are so very much more adventurous, particularly now, when nobody really knows when they will go or where they will go, and when you get off of them whether you can get out of the station to go home, and then the dark stations, and the crowded train, it is all very exciting”131—such unfortunate remarks when trains were the purveyors of death for multitudes. Yet if Stein isn’t the liberal beacon some scholars have made her out to be, that doesn’t mean she is the opposite. Stein adored saints, yet she cannot be posthumously coerced into being one, then flagellated for falling short. At most, what the recent disputes over Stein’s reputation suggest is the envious spite her privileged position

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continues to inspire. “In an ironic juxtaposition (intentional?), the backroom of the ground floor of the Jewish Museum offers an exhibit of the heartbreaking work and the tragically short life of Jewish artist Charlotte Salomon, murdered by the Nazis when she was four months pregnant at age 26. Upstairs is Gertrude Stein, who insulated by her Ameri­can arrogance, money and po­liti­cal connections, comfortably sat out the Holocaust while not far away Charlotte Salomon was dragged out of her house in France and taken to Auschwitz.” Posted on Janu­ary 17, 2017, this was one of the (now erased) anonymous comments left on Sonia Melnikova-­ Raich’s JWeekly article “Exhibit Leaves Out How Gertrude Stein Survived Holocaust” (2011). The issue isn’t so much that Stein harmed, but that she was relatively unharmed—that she floated in a river where the majority drowned.

5

The Pleasures of Solipsism

S

tein’s idea of the “human mind,” our “entity” state, takes on new connotations as WWII gains momentum. In Ida the heroine’s inner conflict between her celebrity persona and mundane existence—between commercial and underground art—broadens into a meditation on the ambiguous appeal that solipsism exerts in a world undergoing war. This world is a resolutely surrealist one. It is marvelous because extraordinary incidents happen every day. Breton’s early pronouncement that “what is admirable about the fantastic is that there is no longer anything fantastic: there is only the real”1 morphs into a truism against a landscape that, according to the Toklas-­narrator remembering her WWI experiences in The Autobiography of Alice B. Toklas, “belongs to no country.”2 While Stein refers to the front lines she drove around on behalf of the Ameri­can Fund for French Wounded—the battlefields and trenches less “terrifying” than “strange” for their camouflage coloring, huts, wetness, darkness, and stragglers toeing the line between “chinamen or europeans”3—her sentiments persist into Hitler’s time. Even as she occasionally snaps herself out of her gloom by reminding us how life goes on (trivial concerns like choking on “a fish bone”4 still pester her), WWII harbors a uniquely hallucinatory quality that distinguishes it from its predecessor. WWI feels tame in comparison, because it never threatened her life directly. In WWII, however, all bets are off. Life emanates a downright outlandish, barbaric, “medieval” aura (to adopt the adjective echoed through­out Wars I Have Seen). In the 1940s Stein repeatedly expounds upon the dreamlike atmosphere pervading her everyday life. In her memoir Paris France (1940), she reflects, “War is more like a novel than it is like real life and that is its eternal fascination. It is a thing based on reality but invented, it is a dream made real, all the things that make a novel but not really life.”5 Released half a decade later, Wars I Have Seen intensifies the surrealist analogy. “This kind of war is funny it is awful but it does make it all unreal, really unreal.”6 “There is no realism now, life is not real it is not earnest, it is strange which is an entirely different matter.”7 “There is no logic to this war in nothing that is a war.”8 That “anything can be a dream, and in war it is more a dream than anywhere”9 hits home when Stein faces the

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“unreality” of local authorities warning her to flee to Switzerland for her life. Now, “government servants” everywhere “really do believe what they are supposed to believe, which has a great deal to do with wars and wars being what they are.”11 The power of propaganda and legal sanctions, as Hannah Arendt immortalized in her character profile of Adolf Eich­mann (Eichmann in Jerusalem [1963]), generates “so many prisoners, prisoners, prisoners every where [. . .] whole countries in prison,”12 a “funny in the sense of strange and peculiar and unrealizable” situation given how “they who put everybody in prison are now in prison they feel themselves in prison, they feel imprisoned.”13 Soldiers appear spectral. Stein recollects French nurses sharing how some German soldiers in an Aix hospital “are not real,” but “depressing phantoms who when they marched around singing like automatic phantoms.”14 Civilians and troopers alike increasingly resemble zombies or automatons, with Stein’s 1941 heroine Ida exuding not a little of this robotic quality herself. Stein dwells in a world where the collage principle realizes itself in the flesh. Hans Bellmer’s notoriously distorted mannequins can mingle freely with photographs, magazine cuttings, sketches, artificial flowers, ornaments, discipline-­themed posters, shearing tools, soup ladles, and rubber truncheons—all objects Levi witnesses in the cordoned-­off quarter of his Auschwitz living block.15 The Dreyfus affair’s legacy keeps rippling through­out regional history, tormenting Stein in vaguely religious dreams where someone “can read acacias, hands and faces. Acasias are for the goat, and the goat gives milk, very necessary these days and hands and faces are hands and faces, and dreams when one is dancing and falls asleep are real, and all this has this to do with anti-­semitism that it is true and not real and real and not true.”16 The self-­questioning tone by the end (“has this to do”) betrays the author’s mounting worries. War as nightmare, madness, surreality—these remain common enough similes among writers old and new. But they attain new poignancy in the context of Stein’s life. Privately subdued by the changes around her, and her changing status within the Vichy government’s social scheme, Stein revisits realism as both a concept and a style. This is a colossal step for someone bored by realism for most of her career. Clarifying what realism means for herself is to do the same for surrealism. One cannot interrogate one without the other. Sometimes “realism” refers to the nineteenth-­ century literary movement. Other moments Stein applies it as a blanket term for lived experience, imbued with surreal undercurrents in her latest circumstances. “Sometimes it none of it is very real, but what is real,” she asks aloud in Wars I Have Seen, “what you used to do or what you do 10



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now, well I used not to sit in a field and watch the goat eat, but I do now, which is real what you do now or what you used to do.”17 A writer chroni­ cally invested in describing the conventional in unconventional ways no longer feels compelled to do so as facts transcend fictions. Roses no longer require poetic renewal in this haze, since Stein has never encountered such roses before. The dream isn’t simply wielded as a metaphor during these years. Unlike her eventually estranged brother, Leo, Stein was no fan of Freud despite practicing her own version of psychotherapy among her friends (character profiles built from interviews) during her first years in Paris. Yet Freudian themes dominate works such as Ida: A Novel and Mrs. Reynolds. Dreaming assumes fresh significance as her schedule becomes organized around bedtimes. Steward remembers Stein and Toklas punctually going to bed at nine o’clock each night. The pressure to save coal and candles, as well as to save themselves from stress and hunger, was intense. Like the Reynoldses in Mrs. Reynolds, Stein and Toklas used sleep to escape a night­marish reality. (The same rationale goes for why Stein enjoyed detective fiction more than ever then: “I want to read them more than ever, to change one reality for another, one unreality for another.”18) Ida similarly sleeps and dreams profusely. Taking after her creator, though, she dreams to avoid her daily anxieties, not transform them. Beyond a psychic safety valve, the unconscious, for Stein, isn’t an innocuously creative wellspring, but the amalgamation of our primal drives, cognitive dissonances, irrationalities, bloodlust. It thus remains something to be treated with trepidation. Veering from the surrealists who wrote off the value of sober consciousness too soon, and unequivocally, Stein emerges as the more faithful Freudian here in her austere approach to human nature. For the same reason, Stein retreats from consistently valorizing the child, that most Freudian of icons. A prominent fig­ure in her last works, the child comes to represent war’s dissociating effects in his or her remorseless solipsism.19 Children engross Stein for operating as the architects and first sacrifices of surrealism’s grandest construct: war. In their inability to step outside of themselves, they offer an easy symbol for the kind of mindless killers the German troops morph into for Stein. The German infantry, in her eyes, can wreak such havoc because they’re children who don’t know any better. Their terrible innocence shields them from the moral weight of their deeds. Watching a procession of Germans evacuating Culoz, Stein and the mayor’s wife are astonished by how young these soldiers look on their mules and bicycles: “These soldiers were children none older than sixteen and some looking not more than fourteen [. . .] these childish faces

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and the worn bodies and the tired feet and the shoulders of aged men and an occasional mule carrying a gun heavier than the boys could carry [. . .] about a hundred of them more on women’s bicycles that they had evidently taken as they went along [. . .] it seemed to be more ancient than pictures of the moving army of the Ameri­can civil war. I suppose said Madame Ray the wife of the mayor that they choose them young like that, because children can set fire to homes and burn and destroy without knowing what they are doing, while grown men even the worst of them draw the line somewhere.”20 Even as children are among the first to fall for their size and frailty, they are also among the first to terrorize. Boys, in particular, belong more intimately to the id in their self-­absorption, their relative lack of control over our strain toward immediate gratification. War, Stein speculates, is predominantly a product of such gendered immaturity. It signifies a regression to the state of male adolescence. More attracts Stein to the child’s perspective, of course, besides its latent brutishness. As John Whittier-­Ferguson brings to the reader’s attention in Mortality and Form in Late Modernist Literature (2014), she ­herself, due to her more abstruse styles, has of­ten been likened to a mentally underdeveloped child, even by Breton himself.21 But more to the point, Stein always looked kindly upon children for their warmer reception to her material.22 They were less put off by narrative amorphousness, more appreciative of her sound schemes than were adult audiences. On a more subdued note, suffering children are among the first to arouse the author’s sympathy, whether they are refugees (one recalls Malcolm’s anecdote regarding the Jewish orphan whom the Genins nearly adopted) or locals. An orphan boy in Mrs. Reynolds, for example, imparts a forlorn impression that outlasts his exit: Mrs. Reynolds went on a little farther and she met three women and a boy who said he was an orphan. But said everyone is he, and the boy said what is an orphan. They explained it to him they said an orphan is a boy whose father is dead and whose mother is dead, then said the boy I am not an orphan because my mother is living and my father has gone away but all the same said the boy I am an orphan, I have three sisters said the boy but all the same and he had a stubborn expression all the same he said he was an orphan. Mrs. Reynolds and the three ladies looked at him and the boy burst out crying and they all walked away and each one of them in a different direction and when Mrs. Reynolds was all alone she went back again but the boy was gone. Bye and bye she knew that she would not see him again and she went away.23



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Curiosity compounds such sadness over the vulnerability of the young. In Paris France, in the middle of wading through her childhood memories of France, Francophile San Francisco, all things French (art, physique, national character, language, government, fashion, existential philosophy, family relations, pets, class, profession, domestic life, cuisine), both world wars, France’s hospitable expatriate scene, as well as post-­Victorian cultural shifts, Stein cuts away to a local Bilignin girl’s activities for the plain reason that “I have been kind of wondering just what a child’s feeling about war-­time is. It is very interesting.”24 Hélène Bouton’s—or, in Stein’s take, Helen Button’s—roadway amblings go on to highlight the eeriness of civilian life at the time. An ambivalence toward others crystallizes in Helen’s militarized country­ side. According to Stein, if one of war’s most haunting effects is the social conflict it inspires, war distilling our impulse to be alone and in groups, everyone feels this push-­pull—children and adults alike. When Stein states in Paris France (and a part of this excerpt was featured in the opening chapter), War brings you in contact with so much and so many and at the same time concentrates your isolation. Undoubtedly that is what a war does and is it unconsciously one of the things that makes wars happen, this thing. After all human beings are like that. When they are alone they want to be with others and when they are with others they want to be alone and war in a kind of way concentrating all this destroys it and intensifies it25

and similarly in Wars I Have Seen, William James was of the strongest scientific influences that I had and he said he always said there is the will to live without the will to live there is destruction, but there is also the will to destroy, and the two like everything are in opposition, like wanting to be alone and when you are alone wanting to have company and when you have company wanting to be alone and liking wanting eternity and wanting a beginning and middle and ending26

she retools her mind-­entity/nature-­identity debate. The interwoven terms “human mind,” “human nature,” “entity,” and “identity” acquire a new po­ liti­cal edge in Stein’s present circumstances. A certain wistfulness colors her efforts to assume a mind/entity attitude in fascist Europe’s overwhelmingly identity-­oriented universe. This pensiveness can be felt even back in The Geographical History of

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America. As Stein juggles the same question of “man is man was man will be gregarious and solitary,”27 she frets over how “human nature plainly worries about identity.”28 In comparison, the “human mind” emerges as a state of grace, untouched by nature/identity’s fears of aging, death, and war (itself indebted to nature/identity’s worst vagaries). An elegiac atmosphere permeates the tract as Stein repeatedly admits to shedding tears at the drop of a hat and feeling anxious regarding Europe’s warmongering. So she gravitates toward America’s quieter plains. Her specialized terms sometimes unravel into lines to the tune of “A communist and individualist a propagandist a politician cannot listen to the human mind, a business man can and anybody who can sit and write can he can listen to the human mind,”29 yet they consistently regain focus through her steady po­ liti­cal worries: “Europe is too small to wage war,”30 “Europe can stay but it cannot wage war any longer. This is what all the world is that it cannot wage war any longer and so it might just as well stop.”31 Trying to live like a mind/entity during WWII is like trying to drown out the white noise surrounding a disunited France. These are quixotic quests. “Everybody is so uncertain as to what they hope for and what they despair of, so confused that it is not necessary to know what they think, they think so many things, so very many things and all of them at once, one thing is certain sure, and that is that the French have not a single track mind, that is absolutely certain,” Stein states in Wars I Have Seen. “How they can have such a variety of emotions and convictions at the same time and so many of them completely opposed is perfectly wonderful, but one opposition they all have, they want the Ameri­cans to come and drive out the Germans and they do not want the Ameri­cans to come because in destroying the Germans they will destroy France.”32 The years, alas, fail to yield a lasting clarity. To quote from Stein once more, “It is always hard to understand anything but at the end of five long years understanding gets more and more difficult there is no doubt about that, yes and no.”33 The loneliness arising from geographical isolation (roadblocks and mail suspensions transporting France back to the “middle ages”34), the fear of becoming another wartime casualty, the comfort in numbers—such factors temper Stein’s lingering antagonism toward celebrity, labels, judgmental others. Mixed feelings cloud most of her remarks, and her last characters correspondingly dissociate into multiple personalities. In such a time and place, that solipsism—that push to reaffirm a universe revolving around one—held its attractions for a writer at the majority’s mercy feels natural. Insofar as war aggravates these paradoxical desires—solipsism, solidarity —and its shadow falls upon Ida, Ida dips into the surreal discourse of



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war. More than the military men its heroine meets, how the cast comes and goes without warning, sitting-­room conversations regarding soldiers and nurses, the national anthem broadcast over the radio that moves Ida to tears, “all the refugees there are in the world,”35 the Arab fighters who motion for water, the winos rambling over the nature of war and peace, the mothballs clinging to officer uniforms, or the young fascists who utter, “I know that I will follow any one who asks me to do anything. I myself am strong and I will help myself to anything I need,”36 war’s surrealism wafts through the all-­Ameri­can Ida in its warping our intersubjective sensibilities—­hence, the attention with which Stein develops Ida’s flights from herself, split personalities, and childishly egotistical tendencies. Or put differently, Ida’s inner turmoil—her desire to be alone versus to have perpetual company—is a microcosm for Stein’s war-­related anxieties melded with her residual fears of scoring a commercial following at the expense of her craft. If solipsism endures in surrealism through Breton’s po­liti­cal idealism, Dalí’s paranoiac-­criti­cal method that (enjoyably) pretends to oust the realist-­empirical worldview through sheer force of will, or Artaud’s anti­ heroes at a loss for communion due to psychoses—if surrealism already nurses a solipsistic strain—in Ida, it flourishes in the heroine’s marvelous journeys through an Anglo-­Ameri­can landscape overcast by war, itself rooted in an infantile mentality. For overgrown children create the warzones subtly framing Ida’s existence. Unnervingly, the child, an emblem for tomorrows, disrupts today’s peace. The future negates the present, ergo itself. This is the self-­devouring logic of war. The human race indulges in the Freudian pleasure of undoing itself—beyond solipsism, annihilation.

i The name Ida holds an affectionate place in Stein’s canon. Similar enough to Ada, an oft-­speculated nickname for Toklas’s Alice, Ida appears in both The Making of Ameri­cans and “A Diary.”37 Its inspiration could be classical antiquity’s Mount Ida, the Mountain of the Goddess mentioned in Homer’s Iliad. Etymologically, this mountain has been linked to the origin of all id(e)as in general. While Ida was origi­nally inspired by Wallis Simpson’s life,38 described by Stein as “an abstract novel about the Duchess of Windsor illustrating the importance of publicity in America,”39 it also grew out of (or at least overlapped with) a number of Stein’s other works: A Movie (composed 1920), Deux soeurs qui ne sont pas soeurs (Two Sisters Who Are Not Sisters [1929]), Four Saints in Three Acts (1934), The Geographical History of America (1936), “Ida” (1938), Lucretia Borgia (1938), The World Is Round (1939), and

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Paris France (1940). Written between the years of 1937 and 1940, so setting the tone for Paris France (composed late 1939–early 1940) and Wars I Have Seen (composed early 1943–fall 1944), and potentially influenced by both works in turn, Ida reflects many of Stein’s moods as she transitioned from experiencing the lows of writer’s block to the unease accumulated under Europe’s po­liti­cally fraught climate.41 The narrative may have ignited with Simpson (a provocative pick given her seducing England’s monarch at a time when that nation was Europe’s lone bulwark against Hitler, then Simpson’s later battling against accusations of being a Nazi sympathizer) but remains far from faithful to her story. A text split into two halves, the novel follows its eponymous heroine from birth until an unknown moment in her marriage to a certain Andrew. Events and Ida’s musings are arranged in anything but chronological order, however. What “happens” is a blur of Ida’s interstate travels, family anecdotes, encounters (with people who may be the same person), marriages, thoughts on dogs, anxieties regarding her “twin,” misanthropic sentiments, and childhood memories. A creature of war from having been orphaned at an early age and likened to a “refugee”42 thereafter, Ida expresses both weariness with worldly accomplishment and a susceptibility toward its allure. Ida’s technical innovations are less flamboyant than, say, Stanzas in Medi­ tation’s. The story’s elliptical time sense, splintering identities, montage­ like happenings, collage effect, and topical shifts seem almost unpremeditated. Readers can hold on to certain threads as they wander through Ida’s shifting geography and events. We have saints; multiple genres, in­clud­ ing the epigram and nursery tale; autobiographical shards (the names of Stein’s real-­life dogs find their way into the tale); a bildungsroman; the Ameri­can character; tongue-­in-­cheek sexism (“female dwarf bad luck male dwarf good luck”43); and a theater of the absurd. The last generates much of the story’s uncanniness. Contradictions coexist, characters fragment into duplicates, disembodied voices float in the background, and basic facts get thrown into doubt—for instance, whether three guests who visit Ida’s great-­aunt exist or whether an old woman spotted in a park is a woman at all. The poetry of life and its paradoxes winds its way through Ida’s world with the authoritativeness of a fable. This poetry is of the ethereal kind, though, not bogged down by its own weight. It almost melts away as soon as we try to recall it. Like Dalí’s Dream Caused by the Flight of a Bee around a Pomegranate a Second before Awakening (1944), where tigers erupt from fishes erupting from pomegranates, with sky-­high elephants cavorting in the distance, Ida’s surrealism gathers force through its fantastical juxtapositions sprinkled 40



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across a carefully neutralized Ameri­can palette. A twentieth-­century fairy tale unfurls. A bird says Ida’s name “once upon a time.”44 Three women (fairy godmother fig­ures) morph into one upon drawing near Ida. Other episodes similarly obscure the line between sober and alternative states. An unknown man (perhaps Andrew himself ) lectures Andrew on tokens associated with good and bad luck. Their conversation culminates in all of the superstitious omens—spiders, cuckoos, goldfish, dwarfs—­hysterically bickering over one another’s realness. Meanwhile, the voice Andrew listens to fades away, leaving the signs still squabbling among themselves before Andrew and Ida.45 Such signs mirror Stein’s growing superstitiousness during the war years. In Wars I Have Seen and Steward’s Dear Sammy, Stein comes off as an avid follower of prophecies and favorable omens such as rabbit’s feet, evening spiders, and cuckoos calling out when listeners have money-­lined pockets.46 The elderly Stein turns to the occult, not as a surrealist parlor game, but because it provides “the only reality in this time of unreality.”47 Times were unreal, indeed, as many of Ida’s surreal happenings could have been plucked from Stein’s life. In her last memoir, the author hears tales of women giving birth to dogs. A lady chats to Stein about her nephew’s row with a problem driver. A moment later, the same woman declares she has no nephew: “I only have a niece that is to say I only have a father-­in-­law, that is not my house where I live it belongs to my brother-­in-­law.”48 A little under ten pages before this about-­ face, Stein recounts running into a female acquaintance and “the dwarf of Culoz” on an autobus.49 But such real-­life parallels are adapted into something shy of realism proper. It isn’t too far-­fetched to speculate that the entire novel unfolds in a dream or dreams-­within-­dreams. In a quintessentially surrealist move, Ida explores the full spectrum of consciousness, featuring sleeplessness, reverie, stupor, and dream-­ridden slumber. One of Ida’s dogs earns the name Never Sleeps, and both male and female pronouns.50 One of Ida’s husbands, Arthur, is “never more than half awake.”51 Ida herself simi­larly remains in a trance for the most part—half-­awake, half-­asleep, resting every spare moment, living her life on autopilot. And when she sleeps, she dreams profusely. A field of white orchids welcomes her; clothes resemble Spanish ice-­cream; Andrew perishes as a soldier; Ida becomes a Wyoming-­born, water-­loving woman named Virginia; and a lion devours a boy returning Ida’s package, whatever its contents may be. (The lion reenters Ida’s waking life [if it were to be taken at face value] as a lionlike Pekinese dog named Sandy that becomes run over by a car. Or the opposite: Sandy assumes lion form in one of Ida’s dreams.52) Equally sugges-

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tively, a voice from nowhere and everywhere dictates certain proceedings, one neither belonging to Stein’s fictionalized persona (the “I” who comments, “I do not think that Ida could like Benjamin Williams,”53 and “I suppose [the dog Polybe] died but I never knew”54) nor Ida herself—more a conflation of both, sounding from an otherworldly or inwardly Freudian position. When Stein writes, “Ida saw herself come, then she saw a man come, then she saw a man go away, then she saw herself go away,”55 she writes like an unconscious experiencing its owner’s dream avatar. The question of narrative voice likewise arises when a wino stops before Ida’s house and lectures about peace, war, beauty, and ice. If Ida doesn’t linger to hear his spiel through, who recounts the man’s “Goodbye”56 after Ida’s departure? Such inquiries remind us that Ida situates most, if not all, of itself in the subterranean recesses of consciousness that comprise surrealism’s birthplace and enduring playground. The narrative adopts an idiosyncratically Spartan language to deliver such strange happenings, deadpan. Peculiar repetitions, phrases, and lilting nursery rhymes come together without regular punctuation. Take, for example: “She was very young and as she had nothing to do she walked as if she was tall as tall as any one.”57 Or: “So Ida did not look foolish and neither she was.  / She might have been foolish.  / Saddest of all words are these, she might have been.”58 Some sentences are so subtly manipulated that Stein’s touch becomes recognizable only after a sec­ond glance. The mundane clause “They lose track of each other” becomes, in Stein’s hands, “It was a nice family but they did easily lose each other.”59 Such permutations echo those of Paris France. In that autobiographical narrative, sentences such as “She was always tired as she cooked with the same perfection” become: “She always tired as she was cooked with the same perfection.”60 Other times, Stein’s prose turns self-­consciously obscure: “There whether there whether whether who is not.”61 But Ida generally sticks to singsong rhymes—when it does rhyme, that is: And William, laughed and then he broke into poetry. At a glance. What a chance.62 The road is awfully wide. With the snow on either side.63 For a four. She shut the door. They dropped in. And drank gin.64



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An irregular vers libre generates rhythmic momentum through those spontaneous-­seeming tics, stutters, pauses, and reiterations characterizing everyday conversation (“Ida had not yet wanted to marry, but but”65). Rare metric patterns merge without warning. Above, in the third excerpt alone, a cretic monometer gives way to an iambic dimeter that turns over, at last, to bacchic monometers. Ida remains one of the few pieces where near-­extinct metrical variations—anapaestic, spondaic, and dactylic monometers—­shoot through a stark, slightly ungrammatical layman English. Here is wordplay that revels in metonymy, homonymy, heteronymy, homographs, punning, alliterations, and rhyming rhythmic structures (whose legacy can be felt in Charlotte Pomerantz’s children’s books), all resurrected for a new kind of odyssey. This is an odyssey missing a sense of origin and destination, where the most heroic feat is the main character’s attempt to empty herself of “character” as such, to rid herself of what she believes to be a cyclopean blindness when it comes to human relations. Dying verse forms find a sec­ond life when applied sporadically within a journey that spans at least two continents and multiple levels of consciousness. Ida’s Ameri­can backdrop isn’t just indebted to Stein’s interest in Simpson, a fellow Baltimorean who was intimately acquainted with media blitzes. It has much to do with America’s po­liti­cal significance for anxious European audiences on the Second World War’s eve. If Stein describes France as modernism’s heartland, America emerges as the movement’s knight-­ errant in Hitler’s age. Both nations come across as dreamscapes, but for opposing reasons; and there floats the insinuation that the new world will assume the old’s creative mantle, proffering one of the last West­ern territories where the artist can wander freely. Ida sweeps across an Ameri­ can geography, but it is no America we know. Instead, it is the America that Stein identifies with the spirit of the “human mind” or “entity.” If in Paris France Stein reasons that “the twentieth century whose mechanics, whose crimes, whose standardization began in America, needed the background of Paris, the place where tradition was so firm that they could look modern without being different, and where their acceptance of reality is so great that they could let any one have the emotion of unreality,”66 Ida indicates that this very same century consummates its artistic promise at its Ameri­can origins. Contemporary times, according to Stein, bristle with an “unreal,” which is to say a surreal, atmosphere. The French usher in this mood through their nonchalance toward the peculiar, secure in their cultural self-­assurance. The strength of their traditions wins more leeway for open-­mindedness. Ameri­cans, on their end, foster surrealism through their national credo. The Ameri­can dream gives rise to a dreamlike America, a land pulsing with lighted billboards, skyscrapers, aeronau-

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tical leaps, eerily precise farm grids, wealth, and abstract thought. America, Thornton Wilder declares on Stein’s behalf, “promises to produce a civilization in which the Human Mind may not only appear in the occasional masterpiece, but may in many of its aspects be distributed through­out the people.”67 In Picasso and The Autobiography of Alice B. Toklas, America’s genius lies in its pioneering spirit (with no few flattering comparisons to ­Picasso’s Spanish strain for good measure)—the refusal to accept material reality as is that spurs modern conveniences like aviation, electricity, even transcendentalism. This spirit is associated with the land’s topographical features in Wilder’s introduction to The Geographical History of America. “The United States, bounded by two oceans and with vast portions so flat that the state boundaries must be drawn by ‘imaginary lines,’” invites us to roam in body and spirit, he expounds.68 He keeps going: “Miss Stein, believing the intermittent emergence of the Human Mind and its rec­ord in literary masterpieces to be the most important manifestation of human culture, observed that these emergences were dependent upon the geographical situations in which the authors lived. The valley-­born and the hill-­bounded tended to exhibit a localization in their thinking, an insistence on identity with all the resultant traits that dwell in Human Nature; flat lands or countries surrounded by the long straight lines of the sea were conducive toward developing the power of abstraction. Flat lands are an invitation to wander, as well as a release from local assertion.”69 And wander Ida does. After Ida lives with her great-­aunt “not in the city but just outside,”70 she moves in with her grandfather before she turns sixteen. Few details regarding her age appear beyond this point. Ida lives in a house “on top of a hill.”71 She turns up in Connecticut. A “cousin of her uncle”72 takes her in before she resides with the cousin of a doctor’s wife. Ida shows up in New Hampshire, Ohio, Wash­ing­ton, Wyoming, Virginia, Texas, and Boston. Accompanied by George Seaton, our heroine settles in “Bay Shore,”73 presumably a place in England. In between trips, Ida spends time in Wash­ing­ton, D.C. Flatness can be a metaphor for provincialism, even a dangerous isolationism, at odds with a globalized world. Its ethos can violate the interconnectedness required for a well-­rounded, and rounded-­out, international community—the unified “globe” that renders “dreams of conquest”74 obsolete. (Somewhat more equivocally, Mr. Reynolds tells his wife that “they say that suddenly in Sep­tem­ber 1940 the United States of America instead of being a part of a big flat land illimitably flat, the land against which Christopher Columbus bumped himself in 1492 became a part of the round world that goes around and around.”75 Neither a “flat” nor a “round”



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approach guarantees safety for an Ameri­can pub­lic sharing a progressively destabilized po­liti­cal sphere. The orbit of world affairs not infrequently terrifies Stein. Her children’s book The World Is Round links roundness with the devil, frightened eyes, screaming mouths, gravity’s life-­threatening pull [a little boy named Willie nearly drowns in a “round” lake], and imbalance [children wonder how lizards, lions, and chairs remain on the earth’s surface if “the world is round”]. That the “human mind” forgets how round, and consequently “small,”76 the world has become is far from a fortunate coincidence in The Geographical History of America.) In Ida, however, ­America’s unoccupied plains evoke nostalgia for better days. Something of Ida’s vagabond lifestyle recalls the existentially aimless drifting exhibited by European laborers who “wander so much that they seem to be not moving at all, not anywhere at all” during WWII.77 But the brunt of it captures that yearning for free­dom echoing through­out Stein’s most po­liti­ cally conscious autobiographical work, Wars I Have Seen. For the Stein who writes, “There is no doubt that every one really wants to be free, at least to feel free,”78 “There is one thing that is certain, and nobody really realized it in the 1914–1918 war [. . .] everybody wants is to be free, to talk to eat to drink to walk to think, to please, to wish, and to do it now if now is what they want [. . .] to be let alone, to live their life as they can, but not to be watched, controlled,”79 “That is what any Ameri­can could fight for, that nowhere in the world should those who have not committed any crime should not live peacefully in their home, go peacefully about their business and not be afraid,”80 and “It is impossible to make anybody realise what occupation by Germans is who has not had it [. . .] it was like a suffocating cloud under which you could not breathe right,”81 Ida’s seemingly endless horizon beckons us in both our sleep and waking vigilance.

i Evinced in Ida’s travels and affairs, time goes in loops instead of lines. Stein circles around certain details, adapting them with each round. As a result, it becomes almost impossible to sequentially order Ida’s life. We are given days of the week, months of the year, or occasions (“It was the day before Easter”82), but they do not ground the narrative in specific times or dates. Cutaways, flashbacks, and recurrences take precedence instead. Two different people tell the anecdote of a girl who eats sugar cubes upon hearing about a dog’s death.83 Ida’s great-­aunt “went away,”84 only to reappear a few pages later without mention of her initial disappearance—a fac­simile of herself. Ida’s grandfather houses her on page 6 (of Logan Esdale’s edition), then on 9. Any breaks in between go unremarked. As a narrative

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thread, Ida’s teenage whereabouts ties over and under itself before resettling long enough for us to grasp, then lose. Similar leaps in time happen when Ida marries Frank Arthur. The wedding is alluded to on page 28, but two pages later, Ida and Arthur part ways as soon as they first meet on the road—and two pages after that, Ida hasn’t married anyone yet. Like Frank, Andrew assumes an uncertain role in Ida’s life. “Ida of­ten said to herself she never had met an Andrew” toward the start of the novel’s sec­ ond half.85 Earlier, however, Stein romantically involves the pair. Before we know it, in the midst of Ida’s sojourns and multiple marriages, “Ida was not so young any more.”86 Like an unnamed “something” that “happened slowly and then it was happening and then it happened a little quicker and then it was happening and then it happened it really happened and then it had happened and then it was happening and then well then there it was and if it was there then it is there only now nobody can care,”87 events fast-­ forward, rewind, elongate, repeat, become garbled. Many of Ida’s action sequences belong to the surrealist film canon in their episodic disconnectedness (with scenery and characters morphing without warning); their recontextualized objects; and their fantastical flair. Stein was always interested in principles of recurrence and multiplicity, but in Ida they materialize in a more visually dynamic fashion, never mind the author’s disingenuous claims to be unfamiliar with film. (Not only was she fond of gossiping with the likes of Man Ray, Picabia, and Hugnet about their latest film projects, she herself wrote two film scripts and a few essays on the cinematic medium.88) From imagining movies primarily as exercises in continuing the present, their “continuously moving picture of anyone” erasing “memory of any other thing” for rapt audiences,89 Stein branches out to figuratively conflate the cinema with war for its ability to bend our experience of, not just time, but reality itself. Her ideas evolve from the early to late 1930s in this regard, as war, film, and the dream world bleed into one another as reciprocal analogies. By the mid-­1940s, Stein outright states that her neighbors “feel as if they were at a cinema” as they wait for the Allied forces to approach, the army’s takeover operations “going so fast.”90 As France collapses under the German invasion, Stein pastes an actual film script into Ida’s narrative. Two Sisters Who Are Not Sisters lays the groundwork for one of Ida’s most memorable incidents. An experimental piece that was never adapted into a movie, and Stein’s first to be composed entirely in French, Two Sisters runs three paragraphs long (across two pages), an homage to doubling and duplication. It combines the looping effect Stein pitched to Charlie Chaplin at a Hollywood dinner party



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held in her honor during her 1934 Ameri­can tour (not without some irritation, the Englishman remembers in his memoir that Stein “would like to see [him] in a movie just walking up the street and turning a corner, then another corner, and another”91) with her passion for cars carried over from her earlier script A Movie. A series of extraordinary incidents spontaneously erupts. A laundress gazes at a photo of two white poodles. A car stops nearby. Two women dismount and ask to see the snapshot. In that interlude, a beauty queen rushes into the vacated vehicle and starts crying. The origi­nal passengers throw her out, driving off afterward with the poodle picture. A few hours later, a variation of this action string unwinds. The two women show another laundress the same photo, the beauty queen hurls herself at their car again, then the duo leave behind a package as they exit. Click-­stop, two days later—the reel spins once more: the origi­nal laundress encounters a lad and the beauty queen, who holds the aforementioned package in her hand. The two women drive by the trio, accompanied by a white poodle holding the teleported package in its mouth. This whirlwind of doings without reasonable causes and spatiotemporal impossibilities reappears in Ida. Ida, however, assumes the beauty queen’s role, Ida’s blind dog, Love, replaces the white poodle, and the anecdote’s ending grows subtler. If Two Sisters closes with, “The washerwoman, the beauty queen and the young man watch the dog go by and they understand nothing,”92 Ida concludes its parallel episode with, “There it all was and the woman with the bundle of wash and the young man and Ida, they all stood and looked and they did not any one of them say anything.”93 Such moments cultivate a dream world where everyone switches place with everyone else, and duplicates abound. Facts resemble fictions, since we never know where we are, when it is, or whether everyone is really the same one (all the women figuring as Ida, all the men her husband). Minus their sexual baggage and blood-­soaked elation, one recalls Un chien anda­ lou’s (1929) endless doors, time jumps, protagonists teleporting through walls, actors playing multiple roles, books turning into guns, bedrooms into forests, then seaside vistas; The Pearl’s (1929) living photograph displayed in a hotel full of leotard-­donning jewel thieves (Hugnet’s only film that Stein was almost certainly aware of before their quarrel, having begun Two Sisters the same spring he was finishing his surreal drama);94 Soupault’s cinematographic poems featuring shadowy groups slimming down to lone fig­ures; Artaud’s obsession with doppelgangers in The Sea­ shell and the Clergyman (1928), where officers metamorphose into priests whose faces crack in half; and the superimposed faces shimmering upside down in Picabia and René Clair’s Entr’acte (1924). Occupied France

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renders such miracles mundane. People aren’t who they seem, and one doesn’t feel like oneself, disoriented by the swirl of new faces, the constant comings and goings. Movement fails to translate into intimacy. Earlier, we spoke of flatness. Here, the term acquires another nuance. Stein’s indifference toward developing “round” characters extends her aversion to the extremities anchoring surrealism’s erotic tastes: a comically inflated hotness and coldness. The sexual aggressiveness characterizing Luis Buñuel’s early forays (The Age of Gold’s [1930] finger sucking, flailing limbs, rapturous tongue kisses) would be unthinkable in Stein’s oeuvre. So would Bellmer’s bloodless mannequins, which, depending on the critic, are exaggeratedly sexualized as part of a po­liti­cal statement against Nazi-­style fascism or on its behalf in the bedroom. Stein’s emotional coolness diverges, too, from Sade’s coldblooded will to commit ever more ingeniously ferocious acts of violence. Ida’s solipsism remains that of the child, the introvert, the ascetic, the­ idealist, not the master subjugator. With a heroine who manifests that “disembodied abstract quality of the Ameri­can character”95 as a mind/­entity in action, Ida draws closest to Man Ray’s The Sea Star (1928), which showcases a technical virtuosity and emotional reserve hard to find in its peer releases. Based on a love poem by Desnos, and invested in womanhood’s mysterious beauty (not least of which lies in the female sex’s nonreproductive orifices), his film pares down the theatrical flourishes Breton favored. Stein and her most famous photographer prioritize emotional mini­ malism over melodrama. Ida lacks the psychological interiority commonly ascribed to surrealist characters and subsequently “feels” anonymous. No typical m ­ otivations and emoting can be discerned. The comforts of a stable home and relationships mean nothing to this migrant intent on the road. An aura of anonymity surrounds male characters as well. They are reduced either to names without details or to details without names. Women fare no better. Everyone whom Ida shares company with appears interchangeable. Even Ida’s husbands (or husband) arrive and vanish without fanfare: Frank Arthur (also known as Philip), Frederick, the pipe smoker from Montana, Gerald Seaton, and Andrew Hamilton (also known as the first Andrew, William, and Handy Andy). With names that should matter sinking into inconsequence, the rest evaporate into thin air. We barely re­mem­ber Bernard, the “little man” who climbs anything and bears a saint’s name;96 Benjamin Williams; Old Man Duncan; Charles; Woodward and Abraham George; Henry and Eugene Thomas; Thomas the Saint; or Mark who dies of meningitis. Sam Hamlin of Connecticut earns a few words, but only for a page



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or two. This impersonal conception of desire sets Ida apart from standard-­ fare surrealist works. In Ida all desire is incidental. Our heroine engages in a string of casual affairs, but each one remains precisely that: casual, subsumed under Ida’s solitary leanings. Even the first half’s fairy-­tale ending dissipates as soon as the sec­ond half begins. Andrew and Ida don’t live happily ever after in any familiar sense but part ways and cross paths. Ida continues to meet other men. The point isn’t how a liberated love can enrich life but to forge a terrain where love and other emotions become beside the point.

i One of the principal contradictions shaping the novel’s direction—and countless, to reiterate, exist: “I am never tired and I am never very fresh. I change all the time,”97 “She lives where she is not,”98 “If Ida goes on, does she go on even when she does not go on any more,”99 “Ida never spoke, she just said what she pleased,”100 “When she heard her name she never heard it. That was Ida”101—lies in the child-­adult dichotomy. Children’s author Pomerantz was mentioned earlier, but Ida isn’t a book that publishers nowadays would pitch to children. Like innuendo-­laden To Do: A Book of Alphabets and Birthdays, its Mother Goose–like phrases and names contrast with the plot’s “adult” content: hallucinations, suicide, existential angst, sexual awakening, dogs having to be killed once past their prime, metaphors for barrenness, out-­of-­wedlock births, stillborn twins, failed marriages, child abandonment, religious disillusionment, and so on. Animal copulation is spoken of in especially endearing terms: “[Mary Rose] loved to tempt other dogs to do what they should not. She never did what she should not but they did when she showed them where it was.”102 Ida herself from her earliest years gives the impression of sexual precociousness. She calmly experiences men frotting her in church, molesters jumping out from behind trees, and requests for bedroom favors (“She came to do what she knew each one of them wanted [. . .] some of them hoped she would get something for them. She always did not because she wanted them to have it but because she always did it when it was wanted”103). Stein’s playfully clipped lines effect a nonchalant, and so all the more off-­putting, tone toward such incidents, sharpening the question of whether Ida is a children’s fable, a grownup yarn, or what categorically collapses both like The Little Prince (1943) or Gulliver’s Travels (1726). Such questions could readily be applied to Stein’s official children’s fiction. Begun and completed in 1940, the same year Ida was finished, To Do sports an unusual amount of edgily somber reporting. Stein wrote it al-

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most as a birthday present to herself, to win some relief from the strain of composing Ida. In her own words, To Do is “a birthday book I would have liked as a child, more than I would have liked ‘The World is Round.’”104 That said, the author admits to Haas in an early 1940 letter, “Alice says the book is very funny it makes her laugh but she says it is too old for children and too young for grown-­ups.”105 Everyone mostly agreed with ­Alice’s appraisal, stalling To Do’s release until 1957. On the level of presentation alone, the book is a hard sell to the Sesame Street crowd, being long, dense, rambling, and obscure. (A noticeably arcane extract goes: “Man is man was man will be in. In what period in a minute. Just not. Not what not more than a minute. Madagascar please shut the better part of the half up in a car.”106) Two twin dogs, Never Sleeps (a pet name recycled from Ida) and Was Asleep, frame the story, while a mysterious “Zero” closes it. Under the “Z” section that feels “not real and so it is a nice letter nice to you and nice to me, you will see,”107 Zero democratically levels all life, granting everyone birthdays. Ominously, as mentioned in chapter 4, all the children under the “J” section drown. Many others casually perish as well: Francis, Fanny Lucy, and an unnamed baby, “none of them ever had another birthday.”108 A little boy named Brave drowns after sharing all his money with Annie. Another little boy, George, vanishes after his hair turns prematurely grey. Nero, Netty, Nellie, and Ned fear going to bed, as Stein assures us that they “would have all been dead” in that case.109 For the letter “X,” there is talk of people killing out of fear. Gestapo-­like forces stalk Xantippe and Xenophon to their end. The “M” family sadly stop celebrating their birthdays, exhausted from sharing the same special date each year. Papa Uno loses one of his eyes to a bullet on the battlefield. His replacement glass eye frightens his family, at which point the color of all his children’s eyes turns blue. A couple named Mr. and Mrs. Quiet “had tongues and no teeth, they had knives and no forks, they had spoons and no bread, they had no hair on their head.”110 And who can forget their cannibalistic rabbit that spontaneously combusts? On the amorous side, three typewriters called ­Henriette de Dactyl, Yetta von Blickensdorfer, and Mr. House keep house together, with the two female machines “groaning” and “moaning” without Mr. House’s “big” company.111 The only out-­and-­out “queer” in the story,112 a certain Katy Buss, adores kissing: “Katy Buss knew how to kiss / She kissed it,”113 “And there is enough to chew / And Katy Buss chewed it. / Who knows what a cow does. / A cow chews its cud / Who knows what Kay Buss does.”114 Buñuel’s cow positioned on a bed in The Age of Gold finds its parallel in Stein’s bovine euphemism for, as chapter 1 clarified,



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the climaxing site and moment. Gay male penetration, meanwhile, sneaks in when “Wendell who was thin as a pin” sticks into “stout” William who has a wife.115 Far from sanitizing her prose, Stein’s target audience spurs her to new heights by encouraging her to imagine what her friend, the Yale library curator Donald C. Gallup, calls the “child’s cruelty and love of violent action, and its logical illogicality.”116 This, he tells us in his introduction to Stein’s Alphabets and Birthdays (1957), is how she perceives child psychology. Technically speaking, from the surrealist perspective, any work’s impersonal tone toward sex and death renders it neither fit nor unfit for children, since the idealizing light adults view them through has no place in a world where anything can happen. Even children cannot be perfectly childlike as our contemporary sensibility would have it. Stein herself doesn’t view childhood as pureness, goodness. Children aren’t naïfs, least of all when dreaming. They have nightmares and erotic visions like everyone else. Such dreams unleash experiences of brutality, risk, thrill, and adventure that they normally would never have access to during their waking hours— except during wartime, which literalizes our most irrationally destructive fantasies, so devastatingly does it stretch the logic of self-­preservation. During wartime, children and adults live the same kind of life for Stein. Even as Stein sporadically distinguishes children’s wartime experiences,117 she generally emphasizes how war homogenizes the experiential field. Children and adults no longer occupy separate spheres, since war intrudes upon everyone’s life with the same temerity. Drifting outside the defunct school system, children no longer remain spared from loss. The barriers erected around childhood’s idyllic charm break down, allowing adults easier access to their progeny’s imagination. “In time of war you know much more what children feel than in time of peace, not that children feel more but you have to know more about what they feel. In time of peace what children feel concerns the lives of the children as children but in time of war there is a mingling there is not children’s lives and grown up lives there is just lives,” Stein reasons in Wars I Have Seen, “and so quite naturally you have to know what children feel. And so it being now war and I seeing just incidentally but nevertheless inevitably seeing and knowing of the feeling of children of any age I do not now have to remember about my feeling but just feel the feeling of having been a certain age.”118 Intriguingly, she may accord the elegiac a role in her recent child portraits and prose experiments. Nearing the end of her life, the aging author looks back to her beginnings. Ida’s beginnings can be traced to Paris France’s little Helen Button.119 While Ida adapts a number of Paris France’s vignettes (the shepherd hang-

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ing his graying dogs, the girl feeding sugar cubes to pets, a great-­aunt giving birth to stillborn twins), Helen’s segment remains the most vital. It sets the mood, style, and, to a large extent, subject matter for Ida. Unlike the rest of Paris France, which relies on winsomely sprawling recollections to sustain the narrative’s momentum, Helen’s episode features the same faux-­naive voice later defining Ida. When Helen appears, Stein’s conversational air evaporates. Sentences such as, I always remember coming in from the country to my garage where I usually kept my car and the garage was full more than full, it was the moment of the automobile salon, but said I what can I do, well said the man in charge I’ll see and then he came back and said in a low voice, there is a corner and in this corner I have put the car of Monsieur the academician and next to it I will put yours the others can stay outside and it is quite true even in a garage an academician and a woman of letters takes precedence even of millionaires or politicians, they do, it is quite incredible but they do, the police treat artists and writers respectfully too, well that too is intelligent on the part of France and unsentimental, because after all the way everything is remembered is by the writers and painters of the period, nobody really lives who has not been well written about and in realizing that the french show their usual sense of reality and a belief in a sense of reality is the twentieth century, people may not have it but they do believe in it120

are traded in for the pared down: “Helen Button was her name and she lived in war-­time. She lived somewhere but the thing that is important is that she lived during war-­time.”121 If Ida’s name was substituted for ­Helen’s in “Helen and her dog William went out every day and almost every even­ ing and they always saw some one,”122 this extract could easily be attributed to the 1941 novel. Ida’s idiosyncratic grammar mostly originates in Paris France’s spare prose. Not only that, Ida owes its premise to Helen’s alienated withdrawal from her surroundings. Faced with the gloomy truth “that in war-­time there was not any difference between day and night [. . .] The nights were black and the days were dark and there was no morning. Not in war-­time,”123 Helen clings to herself for comfort: “So said Helen Button to herself, she did not talk to the cook nor to her mother, she did not talk to Emil the boy who had eyes that were so large, she talked to herself. You do in war-­time. / You talk to yourself about chestnuts and walnuts and hazel­nuts and beechnuts, you talk to yourself about how many you find and whether they have any worms in them. You talk to yourself about apples



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and pears and grapes and which kind you like best. You just go on talking to yourself in war-­time.”124 Her soothing herself by entering a world emptied of bad news illuminates Ida’s later efforts to dodge society and “talk to herself.”125 Read in tandem (Paris France and Ida were, again, composed virtually simultaneously and released only a year apart), the two texts intimate that Ida’s solipsistic tendencies derive not simply from the anxiety besetting celebrity but from war-­induced stress. A child’s dreamlike wandering in war-­torn Europe establishes the precedent for a woman’s dreamlike wandering through war-­conscious America. Temporally disoriented by the chronic darkness, the days blurring into nights, especially without the school calendar to mark the seasons, Helen walks along countryside roads with her dog, William; her playmate, Emil; and Emil’s dog, Ellen. Floating in this vacuum, people drift in and out of sight. Emil disappears one day. Animals blur into enemy soldiers. A wagon carrying an unidentified animal carcass that is missing a tail and ears heads nowhere. Every child’s future crumbles in this twilight realm. The timelessness pervading Helen’s life evolves into a self-­fulfilling ideal as her generation loses interest in the future. War takes everyone out of time in these circumstances, negating all plans for tomorrow under the threat of death today. Emotional inertia spreads. Referring to WWI’s age group, Stein famously coined the term “the lost generation” (if Hemingway’s A Moveable Feast is to be trusted), but its successors share its fate. WWII further erodes every­ one’s forward-­looking sensibilities. As Stein observes in her last memoir, “One of the things that is most striking about the young generation is that they never talk about their own futures, there are no futures for this generation, not any of them and so naturally they never think of them. It is very striking, they do not live in the present they just live, as well as they can, and they do not plan. It is extraordinary that whole populations have no projects for a future, none at all. It certainly is extraordinary but it is certainly true.”126 Living under extreme conditions leaves only enough energy to care about immediate needs. Entire armies of boy soldiers threaten the childhood ideal (apart from the question of whether it need subsist) and the future of all generations under war’s aegis. Although more removed from the military action, Ida internalizes her prototype’s poetic dyschronometria. Helen’s bare lifestyle and accompanying disinterest in anything save the here and now belong to Ida’s ideal mind-­set: the mind/entity that wanders without care for outside affairs. Ida places herself outside of history, “never saying once upon a time. These words did not mean anything to Ida.”127 Time holds no meaning for a mind/ entity. Ida’s “continuous present” phenomenologically subsumes succes-

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sive relations. Like her dog Polybe, whose animal consciousness cannot comprehend causalities, Ida tries not to intuit discrete intervals. “Ida never took on yesterday or tomorrow,”128 and when she counts at all, “It was very hard to remember how many times she had counted ten when once she had counted them because she had to remember twice and then when she had counted a hundred then what happened.”129 Counting is an exercise in absurdity for a creature forswearing both past and future. It would be a mistake, however, to conflate Ida’s time sense with the novel’s temporal structure. For despite her evasions, the narrative remains within an Aristotelian field: Ida ages, marries, traipses through different states, and owns different dogs. Even as Ida refuses a time-­oriented rhetoric, she is gifted with prescience and aggrieved by her aging years (“She said to herself. How old are you, and that made her cry”130). Ida does “not think of anything except now,”131 while Ida advances in elliptical spurts, installed in an unspecified Ameri­can past like Djuna Barnes’s Ryder (1928).132 But Ida projects the child’s solipsism further than Paris France does. Not only does Ida philosophically commit to the moment in a way that wouldn’t occur to Helen but she more zealously nurses her antisocial impulses. Part of this distinction has to do with the length and detail of their stories. Helen earns around ten pages; Ida over one hundred. Another part, though, arises from Ida’s focus on doppelgangers and dissociative breaks. Ida of­ ten brings to mind a child who is coping with stress to the degree in which she ignores everyone else. (Remembering the last chapter, this head-­in-­the-­ sand strategy was one of Stein’s favorites in real time.) The move inward helps her character stave off external demons as it does for little Helen, and also—and this is new—those within. In Ida’s case, as a cross between Helen, Simpson, and Stein herself, her game of pretend runs uniquely amok. An alter ego whom Ida conjures, “Winnie,” threatens to usurp her entire personality. A solipsism more pronounced than any adult’s run-­of-­ the-­mill egoism springs up in defense. If Simpson and her royal husband each possessed elaborate names by contemporary standards—Bessie Wallis (Montague) Warfield Spencer Simpson Windsor, Edward Albert Christian George Andrew Patrick David Windsor133—­Ida bears out the consequences of gifting each subsidiary appellation with its own persona. Following her Ameri­can tour, Stein became more intent on the idea of duplication. Besides the well-­documented paparazzi effect, where she felt suffocated by her celebrity persona, Stein was impressed by early 1930s America’s urban hustle. The in­di­vidual seemed to vanish in the crowd. In Everybody’s Autobiography, she muses that “now since the earth is all covered over with every one there is really no relation between any one.”134



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WWII compounds this anonymous sensation for Stein: “In a modern war there are no crowds because everybody is in it, so much so that there are no individuals.”135 War normalizes crowding, rendering the term redundant. There are no crowds when everyone belongs to them around the clock. Exploring screenplays, along with witnessing herself onscreen, may have fed into Stein’s fascination with doubles as well. Seeing herself on a Pathé newsreel in 1934 elicits discomfort rather than excitement or pride: “When I saw myself almost as large and moving around and talking I did not like it.”136 The experience, one gathers, was uncanny for her—I, but not I. Just as many analogies have been drawn between Breton’s “convulsive beauty” (art so powerfully transgressive as to generate psychosomatic convulsions) and the Freudian uncanny (the guilt-­ridden dread inspired by objects that reignite heretofore repressed infantile urges or superstitions in an of­ten subtly erotic light),137 Stein’s human replicas could tempt comparisons with narcissistic Freudian projections or Lacanian mirror images (the first mirror reflections an infant identifies with, marking a pivotal moment of self-­awareness, even potentially instilling a subliminal lifelong ideal).138 Such uncanny sentiments intensify during war’s almost outlandishly cinematic costume changes. The way resistance members and enemy spies burn through alternate identities both unnerves and amuses Stein in Wars I Have Seen—written after Ida, yet presumably building upon Stein’s sentiments triggered by France’s initial clashes with the German army, then collapse. “I remember when I was young I was fascinated on the stage that anybody came on disguised by changing their wig [. . .] Well secret service people seem to achieve the same thing by changing their names, once they are Hubert and then they are Henry and then they are Charles and the last name changes the same way,” Stein reflects. “It is very funny, a bit frightening from time to time.”139 Her literary allusions give a darker slant to such proceedings. “I have just been rereading Cooper’s The Spy, and there like later in Kansas anybody could be an enemy and anybody not.”140 “When I read Wyandotte or The Hutted Knoll [. . .] for the first time I realized what it meant not to know whether any one was loyal to you or not [. . .] you could think that some one was devoted to you and loyal to you and really not at all they were opposed to you and would if such a thing were necessary denounce you. And now and again in June 1943 it is happening all around one.”141 An anecdote about Stein’s shifty maids, the two sisters Olympe and Clothilde, follows the latter passage, bringing to mind the Papin sisters, causes célèbres within surrealist circles for hacking their mistresses to death. And then there is the possibility that all of these name changes allude to the self-­disguising tactics countless Jews employed to

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avoid deportation or worse. The line between friend and foe blurs during war. Stranded in a faceless crowd, one loses confidence in who is who or where the eastbound trains are going. Alter egos enjoy a privileged status in literary history, Jekyll and Hyde being the household example. Surrealism is no exception. Aside from the film-­related representations listed earlier, Dalí’s bimorphic images spin the doubling theme in a transcendent light. Emulating the paranoiac’s delusions (the aforementioned paranoiac-­criti­cal method he outlines in “The Rotting Donkey” [1930]) revitalizes the artist’s benumbed palate by insinuating an exciting flexibility into all images. A horse is also a woman, a rotting donkey is also an assemblage of gemstones, he cites as examples, much in the same way a rabbit is also a duck (a late nineteenth-­century visual illusion that tickled Wittgenstein to no end). Dalí resurrects, in his own way, the adage that perception defines reality. Surrealism’s revolutionary agenda lives on in his attempt to unhinge the sober gaze through Bacchic hallucinations. But paranoia operates in reverse for Stein. Given the time and place it trickles into Stein’s writing, it, unsurprisingly, assumes a more sinister tenor. As a Jewish Ameri­can woman living under the radar in late 1930s—early 1940s France, a France abandoned by most of the leading surrealists after its fall, her surrealist works have more in common with Artaud’s film scripts and Lacan’s paranoiac case studies for depicting dissociations as meltdowns rather than breakthroughs.143 In Ida doubles generally provoke unease. Mostly confined to the novel’s first half, which was written before Stein checked in with her publisher, Cerf, around early 1940 and agreed to write a follow-­up section,144 they grow from social pressures that eventually propel the heroine into retreat. Out of a combination of loneliness, boredom, restlessness, ambition, vanity, convenience, and preemptive self-­defense, Ida wills the previously mentioned “Winnie” into being. She tells her sole confidante, the blind dog Love, “I am tired of being just one and when I am a twin one of us can go out and one of us can stay in [. . .]. If I had a twin well nobody would know which one I was and which one she was and so if anything happened nobody could tell anything and lots of things are going to happen.”145 The implication is that Winnie can take over all of Ida’s tedious nature/identity responsibilities (climbing the social ladder, making money), leaving Ida to float in her own world as a noble mind/entity. Other doppelgangers circulate—­ Ida-­Ida, Virginia from Wyoming, a mysterious “we” that Ida adopts in Wash­ ing­ton, Christine who owns a Chinese dog named William, the triplets, the quartets, the quintuplets, even Andrew (whom Ida merges with at one point)—yet Winnie remains Ida’s primary foil. Winnie is a celebrated host142



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ess who relishes favors, disapproves of doors for their separating spaces, is beautiful, wins beauty pageants, and enjoys mingling with “presidential” men,146 mostly army officer types bustling around America’s capital. Trouble brews as Ida feels Winnie et al. threatening to take over her whole character. The origi­nal begins sharing her growing aversion to the entire business of twinning before Love—quite literally, that blind son of a bitch. (Stein’s taste for puns likewise peeks out when she names another blind dog “Iris.” Love can be blind, as her own stigmatized feelings for Toklas attest, or blinded by a warring world where no irises can see.) When an army officer mistakes her for Winnie, saying, “Winnie is your name and that is what you mean by your not being here,”147 Ida “suddenly feels very faint.”148 When did she become Winnie full-­time? She herself, however, already predicts this identity crisis from her twinning project’s inception. For the page after she introduces her self-­replicating ambitions, Ida confesses to her pet, “Love later on they will call me a suicide blonde because my twin will have dyed her hair. And then they will call me a murderess because there will come the time when I will have killed my twin which I first made come.”149 This same dog strays from Ida at the height of ­Winnie’s popu­larity, suddenly belonging to an unnamed “them.”150 The owner, all puns intended, loses love as fame splinters her self-­identity. Critics such as Haas have traced this twinning motif, one that exemplifies the battle between Stein’s metaphysical concepts of nature/identity and mind/entity, in a few other of Stein’s works as well: “Ida” (1938), ­Lucretia Borgia (1938), and Three Sisters Who Are Not Sisters (composed 1944). For the miniplay Lucretia Borgia, Haas reads Lucretia’s belligerence toward her alter egos—Jenny, Gloria, Winnie—as mirroring Stein’s own against that part of herself desirous of audience approval.151 That Jenny pens the drama adds an unexpected poststructuralist caveat to the doubling motif: even the writer may be a carefully cultivated persona. Three Sisters Who Are Not Sis­ ters resembles more of an Agatha Christie murder mystery. Three makeshift sisters (Stein recycles the names “Jenny” and “Helen”) and two blood brothers stage a play where being a twin arouses homicidal aggression. As the immediate blueprint for Ida, the novella “Ida” likewise studies a dissociating heroine. Ida possesses two sets of children, two husbands, and two personalities: the publicity-­hungry Winnie who wins “a beauty prize for being the most beautiful one”152 and the retiring Ida who earns “a prize for not remembering any one or anything.”153 Within this chronologically arranged narrative, Ida moves around in a trance, following her husband’s and son’s advice “half awake,” “half asleep.”154 Her 1941 version continues this trend.155

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i Setting aside those resentments accumulated against the media that tracks one’s pub­lic face or “twin” (libel, lack of privacy, even death threats garnered by bad press in Simpson’s case), all this talk of killing one’s twin evokes Stein’s ongoing interest in murder mysteries, not to mention surrealism’s fondness for mysterious crimes—the gorier, the better in the movement’s cause to redraw normality’s parameters, with perverts and the deranged held up as visionaries. Even an inkling of Lacan’s case studies on Marguerite Pantaine and the Papin sisters can be intuited. With­ out belaboring a psychoanalytic reading of a novel of surfaces as opposed to Shakespearean depths, it’s still worth noting that Ida toys with paranoia in a way curiously redolent of the delusions Lacan studied. Although Stein, to my knowledge, never mentions Lacan anywhere, she undoubtedly knew his name as a rising intellectual star for the surrealists. Like the surrealists whom he freely mingled with at Adrienne Monnier’s bookstore, Lacan admired Sade’s literature regarding the aberrant side of all desire. Dalí’s “The Rotting Donkey,” moreover, proved a fertile resource for Lacan’s doctoral thesis On Paranoid Psychosis in Its Relations with the Per­ sonality (1932), which, in turn, won acclaim among Crevel, Breton, Dalí himself, and countless others for clinically grounding their collective absorption in how the mind can delimit everyday experience. Lacan’s later articles in the surrealist magazine Le Minotaure, “The Problem of Style and the Psy­chia­tric Conception of Paranoiac Forms of Experience” (1933) and “Motives of Paranoiac Crime: The Crime of the Papin Sisters” (1933), were equally warmly received. As much as Dalí irritated Stein, it is, ironically, his imprint on Lacan that Crevel and others funneled back to her in their Lacan-­directed accolades. Lacan’s Dalí stirs beneath Ida’s and Mrs. Reynolds’s depictions of war’s hallucinatory effects on consciousness, especially when it comes to the doubles lurking in our peripheral vision.156 Returning to Lacan’s thesis, however, Lacan describes a mannishly bisexual paranoiac named “Aimee” (Marguerite Pantaine) whom Crevel very much identified with, and who easily could be one of Ida’s models. Speaking to the phantom siblings haunting Stein’s own life (she and Leo followed two stillbirths and confessed to feeling uneasy from their earliest years regarding their compensatory origins), Marguerite is named after an elder sister who was burned alive, is born right after her mother undergoes a stillbirth, and eventually experiences a stillbirth herself. Just as strikingly, Marguerite obsesses over both the Prince of Wales and the actress Huguette Duflos, attempting to assassinate the stage siren while nursing her own hopes of becoming a famous writer. Possessing a dramati-



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cally Freudian family history, where sisters act like mothers and romantic rivals, uncles serve as husbands (Marguerite’s eldest sister, Elise, married their uncle Guillaume), and husbands assume a more paternal role, the Anglophilic Marguerite lives out Ida’s homicidal fantasies. She similarly grapples with celebrity, lashing out at her idols in fits of envious self-­ identification and paranoia. The fig­ures she worships both enrage her for flaunting their successes and terrify her for persecuting their devout following. As it does for the fictional Ida, aloneness emerges as an attractive option for Marguerite.157 Such sadomasochistic themes of doubling intensify in the 1933 Papin­ sisters’ case. Not only were Christine and Léa Papin fiercely loyal to each other, the younger Léa following Christine’s call to dismember their em­ ployers without hesitation (eyes were torn out, thighs sliced with kitchen knives), they retired to bed together after their violent double homicide. Their sheer savagery prompted Lacan to frame them as characters lifted from Greek tragedy, the modern-­day equivalent of classical antiquity’s harpies, Furies, bacchantes. The Papins, indeed, opened the door to new myths for Breton’s crowd. A distinct glamour tinted their murderous acts, which became construed as symbolic strokes against France’s bourgeois values. No longer would the proletariat quietly serve. Nor would staid romances satisfy the pub­lic anymore, as the sisters titillated audiences with their history of sexual abuse (their father, it was reported, groomed Christine for years), the particular wounds they inflicted on their mistresses, and their rumored incestuous relationship.158 Smoldering with such undercurrents, Ida’s psychodrama deteriorates to the point where Ida flees at Winnie’s mention. From writing letters to Winnie, the winner in herself, Ida embraces a solipsism so severe that no one, not even herself, exists. She of­ten “goes away” to “live where she is not,”159 mentally vacating the nature/identity she so despises. During such out-­of-­body episodes, our heroine gazes at herself from a bird’s-­eye view: “Ida saw herself come, then she saw a man come, then she saw a man go away, then she saw herself go away.”160 Other instances, Ida vacillates between silence, sleep, and soliloquy: Now just listen to me, she said to herself, listen to me, I am going to stop talking and I will. Of course she had gone away and she was living with a friend. How many of those who are yoked together have ever seen oxen. This is what Ida said and she cried. [. . .] She went over everything that had ever happened and in the middle of it she went to sleep. When she awoke she was talking.

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How do you do she said. First she was alone and then soon everybody was standing listening. She did not talk to them. Of course she did think about marrying. She had not married yet but she was going to marry. She said if I was married I’d have children and if I had children then I’d be a mother and if I was a mother I’d tell them what to do. She decided that she was not going to marry and was not going to have children and was not going to be a mother. Ida decided that she was just going to talk to herself. Anybody could stand around and listen but as for her she was just going to talk to herself. She no longer even needed a twin.161

Ida’s attempt to cut off the world is, needless to say, doomed from the outset. It remains a symbolic gesture at best. For even talking to herself is social in principle. (To talk in the presence of others, more so. One knows others are listening, their gaze subliminally affecting one’s words.) To the extent that to be articulate is to be a socialized creature, since language, as chapter 2 addressed, is a pre-­given matrix anchoring our intersubjective understanding, all writers write for others. Stein reaches this conclusion herself in a 1935 University of Chicago lecture: “So then although any one can say that they do not write for an audience and really why should they since anyway the audience will have its own feeling about anything nevertheless the writer writing knows what he is writing as he recognizes it as he is writing it and so he is actually having it happen that an audience is existing even if he as an audience is not an audience that is is one not having a feeling that he is an audience and yet that is just what a writer is. As he is a writer he is an audience because he does know what an audience is.”162 This passage remains a forceful statement against the artist as solipsist. Mind/entity can only be imagined by nature/identity—and as an impossible reverie at that. Stein’s publishing ambitions and her heroine’s schizophrenic social behavior point to this sense of limit. As chapter 3 discussed, no little posturing occurs when Stein claims to be utterly indifferent to audiences. People may be alone in the deepest phenomenological sense for Stein, as she admits in “A Transatlantic Interview 1946”: “Nobody enters into the mind of someone else, not even a husband and wife. You may touch, but you do not enter into each other’s mind.”163 Yet she still devotes her life to conjuring that moment of contact and wants to be appreciated for it. In A Move­ able Feast, Hemingway describes a Stein who usually writes unintelligibly



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by conventional standards without relinquishing the conventional desire to be lionized by the public. Her ambitions are apparent in a 1934 radio interview with William Lundell. When Stein tells her interviewer, “Nothing can be the same thing to the other person. Nobody can enter into anybody else’s mind; so why try?” he queries back, “Then why did you publish manuscripts that were really written only for yourself?”164 All Stein can say is: “There is the eternal vanity of the mind. One wants to see one’s children in the world and have them admired like any fond parent, and it is a bitter blow to have them refused or mocked. It is just as bitter for me to have a thing refused as for any little writer with his first manuscript. Anything you create you want to exist, and its means of existence is in being printed.”165 Even the most nonconforming writers toil to be heard by readers and other writers. Even their most antisocial characters chafe when ignored or dismissed. For all her frustrations with conversation and companionship, Ida still becomes “very angry” when two men find her “not interesting” and will not listen to her once they know she is “not going to stay.”166 What happens next is a far cry from when Ida shuts down: “You are not listening to me, she said [to them], you do not know what you are saying, if I talk you have to listen to what I say, there is nothing else you can do.”167 (The insistence sharpening this command betrays a little of Simpson’s budding imperiousness as Edward’s new consort.) The push for communion is further reinforced in Ida’s finale. Ida, Andrew, and unnamed others primp themselves for what feels like the final curtain call: “If she said anything she said yes. More than once nothing was said. She said something. If nothing is said then Ida does not say yes. If she goes out she comes in. If she does not go away she is there and she does not go away. She dresses, well perhaps in black why not, and a hat, why not, and another hat, why not, and another dress, why not, so much why not. / She dresses in another hat and she dresses in another dress and Andrew is in, and they go in and that is where they are. They are there. Thank them. / Yes.”168 The couple walk onstage to receive our applause. The “Yes” belongs to everyone: the narrator, the cast, us. “No and yes”169—the novel cyclically discards and resumes a variety of positions on the question of human connection, mirroring the way war splinters our social proclivities for Stein. Even Ida’s two-­part structure em­bodies this internal conflict. The twinning motif dies out by Ida’s sec­ ond half, written April–May 1940, right before France’s military collapse. The tenor of Ida’s solipsism shifts from the frazzled celebrity’s to the wartime child’s as Germany’s shadow lengthens. Omens, dogs, and fantasies of running away assume center stage in a world where Andrew worries

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about moving freely (“If there was a war or anything Andrew could still take a walk every day”170), the death of “somebody’s son”171 grieves Ida, and admirals and generals leave behind unlucky widows. Ida may begin with the 1938 version of Ida, but it ends with Paris France’s Helen Button, with all of the author’s wartime ambivalence fueling a surrealist drama of contraries in between. Nothing is final or forever in this novel of constant reversals, predictable unpredictability, and games of pretend that go by, as Gallup said, the child’s “logical illogicalities.” Ida goes out of herself and comes back like a boomerang. She wills herself a twin; she disavows all such alter egos. She doesn’t want to wed anyone and yield her maiden name; she marries a slew of men (or holographic copies of the same man) for money. She wants to be left alone and just talk to herself or stop talking altogether; talking becomes a way of “earning a living” for her, a full-­ time profession.172 Like a pendulum, Ida swings back and forth from being a reclusive dreamer to the belle of the ball. Ida keeps trying to claim a philosophy of social inversion for herself: total isolation from, and simultaneous immersion in, society. Harking back to war’s self-­estranging effect, if one cannot remember anything, in­clud­ ing oneself, one can be neither lonely nor a loner. Self-­negation renders moot Ida’s vacillation between the solitary and the social. Although the text implies that Ida’s memory lacks fault (“She remembered everything and she remembered everybody but she never talked to any of them, she was always talking to herself”173), Ida purposefully turns away from his­tori­ cal time. She bypasses the question “Why indeed was she always alone if there could be anything to remember” by “not thinking of anything except now,”174 summoning an existential amnesia so extreme that all anxieties—­ twin-­related, war-­related—become meaningless for an, in theory, immaculately impersonal being. But theory, yet again, cannot translate into practice in this case. No mortal can escape history, its wars, or those psychological equivocations “concentrated” by war itself. But certain realities slide right off Stein’s dreamer. She inhabits, after all, Ida, a surrealist novel.

6

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I

f Ida puts its own twist on the solipsistic strain running through­out surrealism, Mrs. Reynolds takes a more skeptical look at how this vein can be embroiled in a desire at war with itself. Far from ushering in the avant-­garde’s cherished pleasures—an uninhibited mind-­set, nonconformity, or a heretofore untapped source of creative inspiration—solipsism in Stein’s last novel harks back to Germany’s adolescent army that, emboldened by the egoism of youth, can destroy its surroundings so carelessly. That history marches on so as to bring an end to Hitler’s reign becomes of tantamount importance here. There is a time to dream, Stein suggests, but there is also a time to rouse oneself. In the quest to counter Hitler’s dreams with those of her own, and betraying not a little impatience with surrealism’s romantic weakness for dream states along the way, Stein flaunts her surrealist hand even as she evolves the rules of Breton’s game. Under her watch, excitement builds in the return to peaceful civilian life, itself irrevocably altered, anyway, by the Second World War’s extraordinary absurdities foisted upon ordinary individuals. In The Autobiography of Alice B. Toklas, Toklas’s character once remarks, “Lipschitz is an excellent gossip and Gertrude Stein adores the beginning and middle and end of a story and Lipschitz was able to supply several missing parts of several stories.”1 Seven years later, in “The Winner Loses” (and despite intervening sound bites along the lines of The Geographical History of America’s “Beginning and middle and ending gathers no pleasure”2), Stein’s taste for storytelling deepens as she explains how drafting To Do thankfully distracted her from the war at hand: “I did get so that I could not think about the war but just about the stories I was making up for this book.”3 In a similar spirit, storytelling serves as the ultimate psychic safety valve in Mrs. Reynolds. The Reynoldses fixate on the story of ­Angel’s life, counting out his passing years in a feverish haze. Just as Stein returns to the weight of in­di­vidual words (“Shakespeare said a rose will smell as sweet call it by any name but will it. [. . .] There is something in a name all the same”4), she circles back to Aristotelian time. Aligning with her heightened interest in lucky omens and prophecies, Mrs. Reynolds’s acts of historicizing, remembering, and foretelling move us further away

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from the non-­narrative modes that sealed Stein’s fame. If some readers, recalling works like “Patriarchal Poetry” (1927) or “We Came. A History” (1930), view Stein’s experimental pieces as roundabout jabs against those reductive teleological narratives Jean-­François Lyotard warns us against,5 Stein’s comparatively mainstream last books might seem irritatingly off-­ brand. But this interpretation arbitrarily links intelligibility with totalitarian philosophy in every instance. Note the qualifier “comparative.” Stein’s later texts are formally groundbreaking compared to commercial and even other modernist ones. They court questions only when backlit against the author’s entire corpus, a stack of literary curiosities to many still. Placed beside Geography and Plays (1922) or How to Write (1931), Mrs. Reynolds appears the very model of lu­cidity. The order it enacts on the level of structure, theme, and style draws upon, in turn, a number of interrelated issues. 1) War-­imposed curfew underscores the urgency of having to keep time in a conventional sense. 2) A stricter sleeping schedule ensues from such regulations, since there is nothing else to do; and Stein welcomes the solace of sleep. 3) Daily rituals of waking up and going to bed fit into Stein’s larger meditation on time’s forward march. Nearing her seventies under Hitler’s reign, Stein’s awareness of her own mortality expands. Wars I Have Seen unveils a personality resembling a modern-­day Hamlet at times: “Why not die, and yet and again not a thing, not a thing to be liking, not a thing.”6 4) Beyond chronicling her own life and the lives of those stirring her pathos (Jews, resistance members, GIs) ever more urgently during her last years, Stein writes about Hitler for the reverse purpose: not to commemorate his life, but his death. Stein returns us to history through the use of prophecies regarding Hitler’s defeat, WWII’s end, and her personal emancipation. Even as all this philosophizing wears her out on occasion, she never quite gives up tracing Allied and maquis victories. In Hitler’s Europe, order can denote the Judeo-­Christian father’s law, the French ordering their house by cracking down on the nation’s minorities, the Final Solution’s sequence, the German army’s discipline, and fascist rule. In Mrs. Reynolds, however, the notion acquires salvational overtones. The Reynoldses await the order by which “the dictator” Angel Harper,7 Stein’s stand-­in for Hitler himself,8 will succumb to time, liberating their homes in the process. Brushing off the novel’s paean to time’s passage in a well-­meaning attempt to consolidate Stein’s oeuvre under her philosophy of the continuous present is to ignore the obvious. Mrs. Reynolds revolves around a his­tori­cal ideal that brings a being who surrealistically floats outside of time back into its fold. After all, the novel



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triumphantly ends with Angel’s expiration date: “Saint Odile had not been mistaken. Angel Harper was not fifty-­five alive.”9 Despite watering down this parting volley with an epilogue that asserts, “There is nothing his­tori­ cal about this book except the state of mind”10 (as if a state of mind were a negligible matter), Mrs. Reynolds consistently upholds time as a force able to withstand the nihilistic timelessness Angel exudes. Mrs. Reynolds shares Breton’s utopian sensibility in this regard, spinning a cautionary tale of what happens when “a perfectly ordinary couple”11 abide in a world without dreams. Time passes as it should to snuff out all angels of death. Regarding Angel’s timeless aura, he may be styled after Hitler yet remains far from an exact replica. Stein’s disclaimer on the book’s his­tori­ cal content at least rings true here. Angel exists as a fictionalized persona operating within a land of marvels. Rather than posing as an autocratic father fig­ure, he comes across as an asexual androgyne, a mythical harpy (“Harper”) of sorts. Never dreaming for the most part, repudiating sleep on principle, and lacking a concrete grasp of the past and future, Angel becomes yet another one of Ida’s twins, albeit more radically solipsistic as the self-­appointed destroyer of all dreams, the mastermind behind the war to end all wars—enemy of the surrealist project Stein provisionally embraces when she integrates the visionary element into her life. More accurately, Angel is a distorted reflection of his literary predecessor, a twisted branch from the same tree. He shares Ida’s wish to build, and break off, rapport. These mixed sentiments become magnified under war’s psycho­logi­ cal pressures, especially for Angel, the draftsman behind the greatest war machine in twentieth-­century European history. He chats to himself like Ida does as well, except his conversational topics are of a darker vein. Ida idealizes the idea of utter aloneness. Angel actualizes it. He tries to bring her dream to life by annihilating everyone around him, leaving only himself behind. He pushes to reduce reality to an orb where nothing breathes and evolves. More than Ida ever could, Angel functions as a solipsist of the first order, not content enough to retreat into dream worlds, but obsessed with reshaping the waking one into something deserted, coldly inert.

i Written after Ida, and before Wars I Have Seen (composed winter 1942– summer 1944),12 while Stein was holed up in Bilignin, this phantasmagoric morality play follows its namesake and her husband as they go about their business somewhere (presumably France) in dread of a certain Angel Harper. Joseph Lane, Stalin’s alter ego in the novel, fares as a subsidiary fig­ure all through­out. There’s a smattering of talk regarding his infancy,

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then ages five, eight, eleven, fifteen, and twenty-­seven before he fades into the background. None count out his birthdays, since this timeless patriarch remains a wild card in the war’s equation. The Russian strongman hovers as an afterthought to Angel’s growing wings despite the cast’s ongoing attempts to wrest him from total irrelevance. “They remembered Joseph Lane and they sneezed and they remembered Joseph Lane.”13 “Have you ever heard of Joseph Lane said Mrs. Reynolds.”14 “Let us not forget Joseph Lane even if he is forgotten.”15 Such crumbs gather into full-­blown approval on occasion. Mrs. Reynolds “was quite pink with pleasure when she thought about Joseph Lane.”16 “It is very nice and quiet of [Joseph Lane] to go on.”17 “I refuse to think of Angel Harper, I think of Joseph Lane.”18 Other times, suspicion prevails: “Do not mention Joseph Lane unless you have to and Mr. Reynolds said he did not have to.”19 Ultimately, Mrs. Reynolds ends with uncertainty regarding the Soviet Union. When Stein writes, “Mr. Reynolds [said] Joseph Lane. That said Mrs. Reynolds is another matter,”20 the matter has to do with Lane’s moral ambiguity. He sports “busy eyebrows,”21 “never [comes] where any one could see him,”22 likes his women to be “round and pleasant,”23 flaunts his strength, abstains from alcohol, is “ubiquitous,”24 possesses a swarthy complexion, has a hearty appetite (especially for boiled mutton), boasts three parents (“Clothilde, Raymonde and Adele gave birth to Joseph”25), “has no fright,”26 “is never peculiar,”27 shares Ida’s torpor (“Joseph Lane was never happy or unhappy never had a door open or closed, never went to sleep or woke up suddenly”28), and, most importantly, will “destroy” Harper.29 Yet the Reynoldses never appear quite sure of whether he is a hero or a villain in their life script. As for Mrs. Reynolds, while she bears some semblance to Wallis Simpson (when not reminiscent of Picasso’s first serious Parisian mistress, ­Fernande Olivier, who also “liked to wear a beret [. . .] was neither dark nor blonde [. . .] pretty with small features and very tall and quite heavy”30), being described as “well born,”31 “not very fond of children and [. . .] never had had one,”32 and “never out of fashion,”33 she mostly fig­ures as a mouthpiece for Stein and Toklas’s Vichy experiences. Like Stein, “Mrs. Reynolds liked roses to be roses.”34 Beyond having an aversion to stale metaphors, she also complains about long winters, as her creator did at the time. As for her husband, Mr. Reynolds abhors receiving updates regarding Angel’s status, constantly worried at the prospect of being sent away elsewhere. Mrs. Reynolds cannot bring herself to read the papers or tune in to the radio for fear of encountering his name, sharing Stein’s tendency to avoid lingering over unpleasant matters. The couple detest and shrink from the dictator, even contemplating whether to leave the area for their personal



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safety. In between their indecision and Angel’s growing influence, a litany of indictments holds steady. Mrs. Reynolds prays against his cause during her daily baths, while Stein alerts readers that to “wish [Angel] well was out of fashion” on his forty-­fourth birthday.35 Thoughts of war consume everything. Continuing the dreamlike panorama captured in Ida, Paris France, Two Sisters Who Are Not Sisters—and somewhat less strikingly given their genre, To Do and The World Is Round— Mrs. Reynolds devotes much of itself to the Reynoldses’ sleeping and socializing schedule as they pray for Angel’s death. As in Ida and Paris France, characters flit in and out of one another’s orbit—ships passing in the night. Stein shows the same focus on random comings and goings conducted within a fantastical atmosphere. A “John” becomes the Reynoldses’ neighbor for a brief moment before he is never to be heard from again. One of his daughters falls in love with a man who abruptly “goes away.”36 Paris France’s little Helen and Emil make a cameo appearance in Mrs. Reynolds’s crossover universe.37 Ida too: “Mrs. Reynolds said that the barometer was falling. She said it to two women with whom she was talking, one of them was tall and her name was Ida.”38 Somebody’s son is a dwarf. Two country sisters dispose of their illegitimate babies in secret, with the younger impatient to milk her family’s cows right after her admission of infanticide. The sight of dark red slugs inching up a tree jolts Mrs. Reynolds from her reverie on clouds and her maiden years. An anonymous infant with one arm arrives. Unexplained screams pierce the night. Human duplicates casually walk around. A sense of déjà vu flares up when Stein describes a neighbor’s extended family. Many of their names—Gabriel, Claudine, William—have been recycled from separate anecdotes. Mr. Reynolds’s younger brother, for instance, is a William, although Stein makes a point of saying that “William” isn’t necessarily his real name, nor is “Mark.” Claudia’s aunt, mother, and stepmother are the same woman. Certain dream sequences— “A man shooting or threatening to shoot with a gun, a man carrying a lamb, a dog looking at a major, the dog black and large and the major small, a guinea-­hen looking at the dog and a woman very cautious”39—bring to mind Two Sisters’s cinematic montages. Toward the end of Angel’s days, his memories assume a hallucinatory quality: When he was fifty-­three he remembered that when he had been fifteen, he sat at the foot of a telegraph pole, not high up but at the base where he had made himself a seat and there he sat and looked at two very large dolls each one in their doll carriage, and one day as he sat at the bottom of the telegraph pole and looked at the two large dolls in their doll car-

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riages some one, and who was it was it a man or was it a woman who was it said to him, either it is real or it is not real and if it is not real it is not at all real or it is real and it is all real you see it as real and not real but it is not real or not real, it is real, that is to say is it, or it is not real, that is to say is it, but not the two together oh dear no not the two together. Angel Harper when he was fifty-­three remembered that when he had been fifteen some one said this to him there where he sat at the foot of the telegraph pole where he had made himself a seat with a curtain and he could look down on two large dolls each one in their doll carriage.40

The Freudian uncanny drifts in with these classic emblems, the dolls themselves and their surreal appeal raising the question of how Angel views people in general. Hitler reduced groups of citizens to the level of inanimate objects. Does Angel’s adolescent recollection mark the beginning of such deadly imaginative correlations? Critics tend to stress Stein’s unwillingness to engage with the Holocaust, yet its imprint is everywhere in Mrs. Reynolds. An unidentifiable stranger probing Angel about those “two very large dolls” presents but the most speculative of such strands. The Reynoldses are terrified of “drowning.”41 Hearing other people’s woes drives these fears to an almost unbearable pitch: “The next day she heard that John the cousin of Mr. Reynolds’s brother William’s wife Hope was drowned with his wife and one or two of his daughters. It was very cold weather and it did upset Mrs. Reynolds. She knew that it could happen did happen would happen. How could it not happen, Angel Harper was fifty years old and so it did happen.”42 The chill of death that Angel spreads results in a winter without end. Refugees such as Caesar and Celestine Rivers bob in and out of view. Having wed an escaped prisoner of war, Mrs. Andrews goes into hiding, spotted in her beloved garden no longer. A particular dumbness comes over Mrs. Reynolds when she witnesses “a great many people coming who did not come to stay they were passing that way.”43 Glacial temperatures, drowning, intimations of an ancient river separating the dead from the living, snow, ashes, dreamless sleep—the unease surrounding such phenomena builds with each page. Mrs. Reynolds holds back tears on many an occasion at the thought of, again, Mr. Reynolds being forced to “go away” like the Fairweathers if Angel remains in power. Equally eerily, when Stein writes, “Need Angel Harper be all right. All right with what. With fire and heat, when all is said, fire and heat. And they all began to cry,”44 she summons gas chamber images that she couldn’t possibly have known about in real time. But such are the marvels of Angel’s war. Even as glimmers



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of hope circulate—the Reynoldses have good days, their sister-­in-­law goes by the name of “Hope”45—too many moments culminate in silence, and not the tranquil kind. As in Ida the cast calms its nerves through sleep. For Ida, sleep is a salve for those war-­bred tensions interlaced with celebrity burnout. For the Reynoldses, it offers a temporary reprieve from a warmonger’s torments. Their entire day is based around their sleep timetable. Stein observes dozens of risings and retirements. Many chapters close with the Reynoldses going to bed. The star couple usually rest “pretty well.”46 Sometimes, their dreams are Freudian wish fulfillments seasoned by hunger and sexual frustration. (Mrs. Reynolds “dreamed that they were spending a whole day with a friend and they had three meats and then a cold supper,”47 replete with “the largest oysters she had ever seen.”48 Much later, after a dream regarding “a friend who had not swallowed [a frog but] had one inside her and the doctor had to get it out of her,”49 “Mrs. Reynolds dreamed about two very large slices of ham upon a silver salver.”50) Other times, they remain fantasies regarding Angel’s demise. On rare occasions, “Mrs. Reynolds was quick to tell again that she did not dream, she said she did not like to dream and when she did dream she liked to know if the dream meant anything,”51 suggesting a defensive veneer before a pitying audience. And when their anxieties reach their breaking point, besides overcompensating by claiming Angel has no place in their imagination, the Reynoldses allow themselves to discuss him frankly before bedtime. Their pub­lic and private conversations, as they were for Stein and Toklas, can be compartmentalized. What they won’t admit before others, they’ll risk exploring among themselves. The calmness of their bedroom is such that the pair increasingly do not care to leave its comforts. The irony is that war compromises even this modest pleasure. “It is not in beds that they will die said Mr. Reynolds and Mrs. Reynolds began to cry and then she stopped and said well said she what is there to say when everybody will be gone away,”52 Stein notes, nodding toward the angel of death who renders all daily reliefs tenuous.

i In Mrs. Reynolds, Stein reinvests in the his­tori­cal. By that, I mean she writes about history using its native narrative form, as the matter of vindicating those oracular pronouncements regarding Hitler’s war assumes a life-­and-­death importance for her. Style-­wise, while sharing Ida’s lexical austerity, digressive flair, nursery rhymes (“Angel Harper was forty-­four and he had not yet shut a door”53), unidiomatic phrasing (in “Gloomy is when Angel Harper dreamed,”54 Stein wields an adjective as a noun event),

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and elusive narrator, Mrs. Reynolds’s prose more densely packs itself in. The average sentence in Ida is one or two lines long, multiplied twice (if even that) for the average paragraph. These numbers double, triple, quadruple in Mrs. Reynolds. There, the average sentence is three to five lines, while paragraphs usually run for at least a quarter of a page. The difference amounts to a spike in tension and suspense. Stein’s customary emotional restraint now frays at the edges as she mixes registers unexpectedly. A stilted “how do you do”55 inhabits the same space as the playfully crass “peepee.”56 Paragraphs such as, She went on and she met Andrew Mather and she said she was excited and he said he knew she was excited and she said to him but you are excited too and he said yes he was but that was nothing new, and she said but you knew that it would be exciting and he said yes he knew, and Mrs. Reynolds said she was going on being excited and she went home and she said to Mr. Reynolds that she was very excited and he said yes but do not be too excited and she said Mrs. Reynolds said yes she would not be too excited and little by little she was less excited and they ate their dinner and she said she was not excited and they went to bed and she said she was not excited she said it was all true and she might would could and was excited but now she was quiet and it was not cold and when all was told, Mrs. Reynolds said she would be excited again and again57

showcase the breathless stream of thoughts that modernism consumed itself to convey in different shades, and that Stein hadn’t thought about (not this legibly) since The Making of Ameri­cans. The stream-­of-­consciousness technique seems an intuitive choice for a novel whose cast understandably has trouble quieting itself down in its disquiet or euphoria. When everyone’s composure slips, Stein’s language fractures as well, reverting back to the trailing conjunctive phrases and repetitions characterizing her early word portraits. “All this time Angels and axes and butter and blisters were very frequent. Half of the time not out loud but very frequent”58 could belong to “One Sentence” (1914), a poem boasting lines like: “The more eggs the better, the more seldom the better, the more hurry the better. Kindness and circumstance and shaved off his beard.”59 Reflecting its community’s restlessness, the novel skips around Mrs. Reynolds’s life, with her present-­day domestic activities punctuated by childhood flashbacks, slumber, dreams, family anecdotes, village happenings, and Angel’s doings. Such conversational strands meander together, then dribble apart as “weeks became years and years became days and days



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became longer.” The Reynoldses settle into a melancholic routine where their eyes blink open and shut without losing sight of Angel’s advancing years. The same elliptical movement informing Ida’s narrative structure operates here, with Stein doubling back over certain gossipy details—­the mysterious woman whom Mrs. Reynolds’s brother-­in-­law married (Hope), John’s daughter’s love affair with a swarthy and hirsute escapee named Oliver, an adulterous romance between a captain’s wife and a colonel— even as the book steadily moves forward in time. The way our repetitions, whether words or thought patterns, define who we are never ceases to fascinate the author. Mrs. Reynolds extends Ida’s reiterations, which echo The Autobiography of Alice B. Toklas’s discreetly spaced restatements. With every reappearance, tidbits regarding, say, how Matisse notices Stein seating artists in front of their own paintings at a dinner party gain extra shine in the 1933 text. To be honest, Mrs. Reynolds is considerably more linear than Ida. Parts I through XIII proceed in order.61 Parts I and II build up Mrs. ­Reynolds’s backstory. Stein leisurely traces the woman’s life history—from her Tues­ day birth to her infant stage, then age six, her schoolgirl period, age thirteen, ages sixteen through twenty-­two—until the point where she loses her maiden name at age twenty-­three. From Part III onward, the focus switches over from Mrs. Reynolds’s story to Angel’s own. A reasonably coherent portrait (by Stein’s standards) of his last two decades emerges. In Part III, Stein tracks Angel from years ten till fourteen. Part IV picks up from fourteen, then skips to sixteen, eighteen through twenty, twenty-­t wo through twenty-­eight, thirty-­eight, and forty-­three through forty-­five. Part V follows Angel from age forty-­six to forty-­nine. Part VI does the same for year forty-­nine till fifty. Angel remains fifty for all of Part VII. His fifty-­first birthday occurs in Part VIII. Fifty-­two arrives in Part IX. Part X goes to Angel’s fifty-­third. Part XI stalls us there. The big five-­four dominates Part XII. Part XIII documents Angel’s life flashing before his eyes (his memory wanders back over his teenage years) as he perishes at that age. Stein may dwell on certain numbers (see: age forty-­nine in Part VI), sometimes backtracking before they are due to arrive or repeating them elsewhere, but the novel’s chronological funnel holds stable in the greater scheme of things. Mrs. Reynolds inverts our ordinary experience of time by tapering it down to a crawl over age. Rather than flying by, time slows down for the late-­ middle-­aged Reynoldses. For all of Stein’s grammatical and plot-­related irregularities, Mrs. Reyn­ olds still grounds itself in the chronology of Angel’s life. As everyone wrings their hands for his time to run out, Stein’s past tense holds steady. Each of 60

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his birthdays from roughly his mid-­forties onward is meticulously counted out. Mrs. Reynolds “burst out into hysterical laughter and Mr. Reynolds said what is it, and she said it is Angel Harper and he is fifty just fifty going on being fifty, and if, and she gave a deep sigh if he only never came to be fifty-­one.”62 Angel’s turning “older and older” is described as being “catastrophic.”63 “It makes one groan in one’s sleep,” Mrs. Reynolds complains, “because he does not die.”64 Stein, in essence, fashions another “book of alphabets and birthdays,” but with Angel at its heart and the letter “D” for “death” as well as “D-­Day” underlined in red. The letter “O” for “Odile” plays an instrumental role in cheering Stein on toward the psychological finish line. Saint Odile becomes a beloved icon (not only in Mrs. Reynolds, but also in Wars I Have Seen) for predicting the end of Germany’s “moment when there will arise in her midst a warrior, the most horrific the most terrible, and he will make a complete an entire a universal war.”65 This war will culminate in “the land of the conqueror being invaded from all sides, his armies being decimated by strange happenings.”66 Unlike the scientifically minded Stein reconstructed in Steven Meyer’s Irresistible Dictation: Gertrude Stein and the Correlations of Writing and Science (2001), where Meyer interprets Stein’s early-­mid-­experimental texts as reflecting an empiricist sensibility akin to William James’s, Whitehead’s, and Wittgenstein’s, the later Stein is an unabashed mystic. She delights in palm reading; devours books dedicated to astrological predictions; listens attentively to local hearsay regarding a hospitalized woman who forecasts the war’s end the day before she dies;67 nurtures a fondness for Saint Theresa of Avila, Saint Ignatius Loyola, and Saint Francis ever since the days she wrote The Autobiography of Alice B. Toklas; and divulges an enthusiasm for divining inherited from her own father (and the Talmudic tradition by implication) in Everybody’s Autobiography.68 This isn’t to say the Reynoldses don’t have their lows. There is a poignant moment when Mrs. Reynolds sees four refugees file past her garden: “They were all dirty and they were all forlorn and they were all crowding up against each other and by that time Mrs. Reynolds had gotten up and went out to talk to them, she asked them where they came from and they all four said that they did not come from the same place so what was the use of talking about it.”69 Thinking back over this encounter as she reads a book later that day, Mrs. Reynolds “very soon was thinking of Saint Odile and could she have been mistaken, and she knew that of course not Saint Odile could not have been mistaken.”70 The greater her doubts, the more ferociously she clings to prophecies of hope that challenge Angel’s apocalyptic world narrative.



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As much as Stein was bored by beginnings, middles, and ends for most of her career, Nazi Germany and Vichy France lent a fresh perspective to these traditional literary concepts. Swept up in a time and place where Hitler’s Final Solution flaunted the power of step-­by-­step planning, Stein viscerally experienced the full weight of history, chronology, linearity, and causal connections. Angel ages and goes about “drowning” his victims in a methodical way. The only thing the Reynoldses can hope for is that by the same linear logic, Angel’s days will wind themselves out as quickly as possible, and history will not vindicate his name. The melancholy surrounding time’s ravages—one remembers To Do’s “sad story of N,” where a family smashes its clocks to freeze time but still cannot prevent “a little clock” from nudging them off to bed, where “they forgot they were born and they were sweetly sleeping thinking they were eating strawberries in the dawn on the lawn”71—takes a backseat to its triumph over a man wandering around long past his bedtime. Published the year before Stein’s death, Wars I Have Seen expands upon Stein’s soul-­searching queries into history’s meaning. “Death starts history and fears,”72 she begins, and with so much death around her, she understandably tries to reconstruct the story behind present-­day disasters. In the process, history “moves in every direction” for her,73 to borrow her refrain from “Many Many Women.” It can be linear. It can be circular when it fails to impart lasting lessons. Stein dwells at length on the incorrigible aspect of human nature (which, somewhat perversely, “soothes” her): “History does repeat itself, I have of­ten thought that that was the really soothing thing that history does. The one thing that is sure and certain is that history does not teach, that is to say, it always says let it be a lesson to you but is it. Not at all because circumstances always alter cases and so although history does repeat itself it is only because the repetition is soothing that any one believes it, nobody nobody wants to learn either by their own or anybody else’s experience.”74 Nobody learns anything, “nobody no not anybody thinks that this war is a war to end war.”75 History can devolve to the Dark Ages when brutish practices reenter popu­lar consciousness (“That of course is the extraordinary thing about this war it is so his­tori­cal not recent history but fairly ancient history, not I suppose where the armies are actually fighting but here where we are”76). Milice roundups, snitches, maquis exploits, German camouflage gear, and pub­lic shaming rituals (e.g., shaving women’s heads) all remind Stein of medieval times in her last memoir. History can feel static when the young live one day at a time without long-­ term plans. It can “pass so very quickly.”77 It can swirl into a blur: “War makes things go backward as well as forward and so 1914 was the same as

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1878 in a way [. . .] when there is a war the years are longer that is to say the days are longer the months are longer the years are much longer but the weeks are shorter that is what makes a war.”78 Basically, history can unfold in so many ways as to elude easy predictions. So while Stein desperately hopes it follows a certain course, she places more emphasis on keeping abreast with the times in general. Much as the Reynoldses note Angel’s birthdays, Stein records the war’s progress as she awaits peace. WWII is divided into distinct stages, she feels: “Everybody feels as if it was like the beginning of the invasion in forty, but then it was a beginning a long beginning and a very long middle and now everybody feels that it is an ending and the French have always felt that a wounded beast is always worst when it is cornered.”79 At this point, her impatience becomes nigh unbearable. “To-­day is Monday in February nineteen forty-­four.”80 “Spring is here, it is the first of March nineteen forty-­four and spring is here, well not quite here but pretty well here, and everybody feels a little more hopeful, they are all wishing that it would be over without France being invaded.”81 “It was the tenth of March nineteen forty-­four here in the station at Culoz.”82 “April nineteen hundred and forty-­four, that is Easter week.”83 “It is now the eleventh of April the Tuesday after Easter-­Monday.”84 “It is the first of May nineteen forty-­four.”85 “To-­day the fifteenth of May nineteen forty-­four.”86 The first Ameri­can arrives at Culoz “to-­day oh happy day yesterday and to-­ day, the first of Sep­tem­ber 1944.”87 The need to respect curfew frames this flurry of dates related to history’s broader march. Stein even purchases a wristwatch to ensure she never breaks curfew and risks getting shot “out on the road somewhere.”88 Coincidentally, too, the watchmaker’s son acts as “the most steadfast and violent pro-­ally even in the darkest days”89—a poetic image, indeed, the son of time being an ardent moral compass. The overall impression gathered from such moments is worldly, one steeped in “human nature,” “identity,” current affairs, his­tori­cal narratives, and linear sequences. Stein is playing the historian’s waiting game in a surreal universe imploding upon itself.

i The question of history in Mrs. Reynolds has brewed for a while. Already from “A Diary” (1927) and “History or Messages from History” (1930), despite their more ambitiously experimental language, Stein’s receptiveness to chronicle writing can be discerned. “A Diary” pools together gnomic assertions and stray musings regarding each day’s incidents (food consumed, friends hosted, places visited, et cetera). At its heart lies Stein’s



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personal “account of those who have been here,” crystallized through call-­ and-­response rallies: 90

Has Bravig been here. Yes. Has Henry been here. Yes. Has Horace been here. Yes. Have we been here. Yes.91

At the same time, the piece ends on an ambivalent note. Stein almost seems to mutter out the lines: “A diary not a diary not a diary of this not a diary. Will there be a diary a daily diary. There will not be a daily diary and this is because at that time naturally in order not to have it be as important as the other not at all.”92 Although what “the other” option would be remains vague, the greater internal debate lingers on: should she embrace his­tori­ cal narratives, or would that gesture philosophically undermine her literary breakthroughs devoted to conveying the moment? “History or Messages from History” externalizes the his­tori­cal in its very structure. The sec­ond “Part II” listed in a row fuses Stein’s love of Delphic pronouncements with her characteristically jumbled scenes (random players engaged in random acts somewhere for unknown reasons). While this section opens with the subheading “Messages from History,” its messages remain predictably difficult to decipher. That being said, the fact that the segment features a series of more or less chronologically numbered subheadings suggests the returning appeal of narrative writing for the author. Under the sec­ond “Part II,” the following subheadings can be found in order: Messages from History, 2, 3, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8, 9, 10, 5, 6, 7, 8, 9, 9, 10, 11, 12, 12, 14, 15, 16, 17, 18, 19, 20, 21, 22, and 23. Only five numerical ruptures appear: the consecutive threes, nines, and twelves; the five following the first ten; and the missing thirteen.93 Add to the subheading order a smattering of coherent enough clauses that anticipate those defining The Autobiography of Alice B. Toklas and Ida, and one realizes Stein’s his­tori­cal turn began at least a decade before her WWII phase. Lines such as “The characters are to be she and they. He is not dissatisfied. They are very well. It is very kindly. They are there where she is and that is because they will not be saddened by her living and leaving in three places”94 are dead ring-

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ers for Ida’s prose. Another clause—“Once more everybody went away”95— lays the ground for the way in which Toklas’s pseudo-­memoir and Ida follow characters entering and exiting scenes without graceful forewarning. Interestingly enough, before its formal appearance in the late 1930s, “human nature” isn’t identified with history in “History or Messages from History”: History is this. Human nature is the same that is not history. A dog is dissatisfied and restless that is not a history. He is unpleasant in all his little ways and we do not care about him although we forgive him that also is not history. The son of Mrs. Roux has failed in his examinations that is to say he has been discouraged from attempting them that is not history. What is history they make history. In times of attention they are not certain that they will obtain what they wish this might be history but it is not history. Intention is not history nor finality finality is not history. Think what is history. Mildred made and knew history.96 Pierre does not make but fears history. Bernard leaves and leans on history.97

Unlike nature/identity, history can harbor positive connotations when rooted in the personal or private. Take, for instance, subheading “15”: HISTORICAL 7 And lovely flowers mostly roses pansies and dahlias. 7.15 And very delicate and spicy herbs. 7.30 He was quite welcome was he not. 8 A hat very well suited to the usage for which it was and is intended Beans 9.30 A great many beans. Basket 10.30 He is sometimes a trial of patience. Bathe 11.30 A pleasure and a refreshment. This is his­tori­cal in the best sense.98 Flowers Herbs Francis Hat

A record of the humble details that make up an individual’s everyday life constitutes history in the nicest sense. History’s lessons here do not have to do with the overarching national narratives highlighted in Wars I Have



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Seen, but with the Wordsworthian wisdoms accumulated over quiet walks: “History teaches us that whether clouds have in the part of them a spiral movement made by the action of the wind or not as long as the barometer shows no change the rain will continue, at intervals, with pleasant weather interspersed.”99 And then at other times, Stein doesn’t appear ready or willing to sum up history for us just yet. “History of the learning of spectacular consistency privately and learning it alone and when more comes they receive,”100 “History please when will for their sake they repay their adage,”101 and “History is this they may I say add leave that”102 only make sense to the author. Three years later, a historicizing worldview bursts into bloom in The Au­to­ biography of Alice B. Toklas, which especially celebrates the self-­mythologizing impulse inspired by “Queen Victoria’s letters,”103 “missionary autobiographies and diaries,”104 and the First World War’s Ameri­can GIs who are making history in the trenches. Stein’s Toklas fondly recollects cheering up her army pen pals through care packages and personalized letters. “One had to remember all their family histories”105 to avoid embarrassing mix-­ ups, with history emerging as a life-­affirming force that uplifts each soldier. Each doughboy has a personal history shaped by his family and local neighborhood that he lovingly shares with Stein. These in­di­vidual histories run together to forge the larger narrative of America’s history that will be continually revised by posterity. (Unsurprisingly, for Stein the Ameri­can patriot, history acquires a far rosier inflection in the sphere of Ameri­can infantry mail as opposed to Hitler’s Aryan master plan.) Stein’s frazzled nerves resulting from her 1933 memoir’s success may have temporarily dampened her sec­ond-­wave preoccupation with narrative forms, but the reasons that drew her back to the genre never went away. For the author of Q. E. D., Three Lives, and The Making of Ameri­cans, nature/identity writing has always exerted an attraction, regardless of Stein’s later more subdued documentarian approach as nature/­identity picks up po­liti­cal overtones barely imaginable in The Autobiography of Alice B. Toklas.106 The predominance of the criti­cal trend to underplay Stein’s investment in the idea of history and historicized writing (the narrative genre) despite Stein’s telltale signs to the contrary has to do, in my view, with two factors. The first, and most obvious, is Stein’s own diatribe against nature/ identity in The Geographical History of America and “What Are Master-­ pieces,” which obscures her own vacillations on the subject. The sec­ond arises from Stein’s late 1980s and 1990s poststructuralist readings that tend to treat historiography and its perceived literary parallel, realist fiction, as being intrinsically vapid and po­liti­cally conservative—relics to be

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jettisoned into history’s dustbin. (Creatively misreading Derrida and Foucault, this interpretive camp conflates referential meaning with dispiriting social divisions, history with state-­sanctioned propaganda, and literary real­ism with psychological reductionism.) This overgeneralizing approach has been slowly losing steam as biographical criticism is regaining currency under vari­ous guises (under “Narrative Historicism,” for instance, as opposed to the deceptively titled “New Historicism,” with books in the flavor of Kevin Birmingham’s The Most Dangerous Book: The Battle for James Joyce’s Ulysses [2014] leading the roster), but it’s still a force to be reckoned with, especially as Stein-­inspired Language poets themselves have a habit of lumping traditional reading and writing practices with oppressive institutional cultures. Language poets scramble semantic order to, in part, protest the hierarchical society it both frames and derives from, regardless of the fact that Stein never valorizes textual indeterminacy for quite these egalitarian reasons. Such antiestablishment discourse—where something evokes many things, many things can democratically be accessed through one—betrays more of the Beats’ revolutionary fervor than Stein’s mysticism founded upon solitary genius. Critical pieces representative of the ahis­tori­cal slant toward Stein’s WWII literature would be Maria Diedrich’s “‘A Book in Translation about Eggs and Butter’: Gertrude Stein’s World War II” (1990) and Ellen E. Berry’s Curved Thought and Textual Wandering: Gertrude Stein’s Postmodernism (1992). Diedrich reads Mrs. Reynolds as an exercise in the continuous present to the extent that it pays more attention to Mrs. Reynolds’s fluctuat­ ing moods than to a bird’s-­eye view of factual events. Wars I Have Seen similarly upholds a “perspective” that is “antihis­tori­cal, immediate, and devoted to life,”107 according to Diedrich, for its “nonhierarchical succession of gossip, conversation, report, factual information, reminiscences, and generalizations.”108 This perspective is a distinctly feminine one for Diedrich. Stein deemphasizes “the established male rhetoric of heroism [. . .] the major ideological struggle of the war”109—the “conventional patterns of order, rationality, linearity, and hierarchy”110 that Diedrich silently affixes with the masculine—as a woman writing from the civilian sphere. Yet her explanation ignores how Stein herself was very much interested in history with both a capital and a lowercase “H.” Wars I Have Seen, for one, expends much effort meditating on the question of his­tori­cal progress across the centuries, war’s underlying causes, and great men in the tradition of George Wash­ing­ton, all without precluding a concern with mundane affairs. Moreover, it is, again, highly conventional compared to



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Stein’s earlier hermetic works. The memoir skips around a bit but still presents information in an intelligibly sustained manner, adhering to traditional narrative principles that Diedrich would find innately distasteful. Berry clarifies, not incidentally, why such principles feel suspect two years later. In Curved Thought, she likewise conceptualizes Stein’s last works as “explicit critiques of the ideology of linear narrative.”111 Mrs. Reyn­ olds, in her hands, operates as a rhetorical assault against Angel Harper, the quintessentially male tyrant-­type portrayed in Everybody’s Autobiography (“There is too much fathering going on just now and there is no doubt about it fathers are depressing”112). Harper fig­ures as both an authoritarian ideal and its associated literary mode of transmission for Berry, based on the following thread that consolidates twentieth-­century philosophies of history promulgated by the likes of Michel Foucault, Michel de Certeau, Hayden White, Fernand Braudel, Maurice Blanchot, and the écriture femi­ nine movement (all Berry’s examples): As David Carroll emphasizes, in the nineteenth century the novel explicitly modeled itself after history, acquiring value to the extent that it was considered to be a form of history. What this means, of course, is that a certain form or mode of the novel (realist) and a particular structuration of history (what Michel Foucault has called continuous history) were privileged as definitive, united around specific assumptions concerning the his­tori­cal nature of the world and the narrative form best suited to represent and interpret it. Whether in the writing of history or the writing of fiction, realism is premised on belief in a closed universe and a continuous world ordered according to a generative, progressive, linear, causal temporality and in which the in­di­vidual subject is the vital force. But a realist narrative ordering, which imposes coherence and continuity for the purposes of making history intelligible, in effect also reduces its complexity since such an order conceals gaps, discontinuities or interruptions in the progressive movement of time or in the coherence of the subject as agent of history. Thus the form and the frame of traditional continuous history are not neutral having as they do ideological effects on the production and sense of history, on what and who will count as his­tori­cally significant. History functions through construction of a set of normative concepts that interpret and fix available cultural meanings and may repress alternative constructions. As a discourse of authority, legitimation, and prohibition, narrative history—in the way it structures and orders meaning for culture—­accrues to itself the power to define and legislate “what

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happened.” As it can be said to replicate and reinforce existing social and ­legal codes, narrative history may also act to justify and perpetuate unequal power relations (such as the cultural dominance of patriarchy) that are the legacy and effect of these cultural arrangements.113

In her concern with the power dynamics behind who disseminates what version of the official record, she confuses narrative biases with­narrative writing in general—the politics underlying institutionalized histories with the realist genre wholesale. True, histories are loaded with hidden agendas and personal baggage, of­ten by the powerful seeking self-­justifications. Nev­ ertheless, it is doubtful whether any nineteenth-­century realist ­novelists— ­a group diverse enough to cover George Eliot, Henry James, Gustave Flaubert, Théophile Gautier, Anton Chekhov, and Fyodor D ­ ostoevsky—­would envision their creative efforts in such a high-­handed manner, especially considering their ambitions to complicate mainstream attitudes toward social pariahs. Much realist fiction shares Berry’s commitment to illumi­ nating larger stretches of the human experience before an unknowable world. Projecting her logic forward in time as well, are all the writers who resort to realism today tainted by association? Taken to extremes, ­Berry’s argument broaches the possibility that even left-­wing darlings such as Toni Morrison and Chang-­Rae Lee could be accused of subliminally furthering a totalitarian sensibility through their prose style, while po­liti­cal reactionaries modeled after F. T. Marinetti become enshrined as liberal icons for their formal innovations. Another analogy closer to Stein herself would be conceptualizing Picasso as a feminist painter for breaking with classical portraiture. What all this talk amounts to, I suppose, is yet another reminder of how remarkably resilient and adaptable realism continues to be, having survived with gusto into the twenty-­first century to frame more stories about all kinds of subjects—from colossal opera­tic dramas to the loner’s fragmented introspections to animal sentience and beyond. Flash­ backs, flash forwards, location jumps, and indirect free style, among other techniques, have become so commonplace, finally, that contemporary audiences have forgotten their history of gradual assimilation into the real­ ist genre. Real­ism evinces the absorptive power critics of­ten begrudgingly accord the museum. Rather than reading Mrs. Reynolds beside Winston Churchill’s My Early Life (1930), it is more helpful to compare it to Stein’s other works—and with a more sensitive eye toward her timekeeping motif. Returning to Curved Thought, Berry interprets Stein’s movement away from realism (disregarding realism’s imaginative potential, not to mention the idiosyncratic



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nature of Three Lives, The Making of Ameri­cans, and Q. E. D. themselves) as resulting from “Stein’s growing dissatisfaction with the conclusions held out by realist modes, conclusions that seemed to replicate the power relations created by sexual difference,”114 rather than the more likely culprit: her ambition to stretch the formal limits of her medium as a genius rivaling Picasso. There is no evidence that Stein perceived realism as a po­liti­ cally repressive vehicle, only an artistically vitiated one. From her point of departure, Berry views Mrs. Reynolds as “both demonstrating the weight of pub­lic or official history and dislocating its unitary authority, showing it to be an unstable ideological construction whose ideology includes its appearance of being coherent and self-­contained.”115 If Stein’s earlier works thwart “the problem of the incommensurability between patriarchal orderings of reality and the representation of female experience and desire” via abstraction,116 then the more accessible Mrs. Reynolds achieves the same end by prioritizing the everyday, skipping around in time (specifically through Angel’s flashbacks), and inserting the prophetic element. The first two ingredients that Berry mentions remain general enough as to be trivial. In its incorporating routine activities and temporal ma­ nipu­la­tions, even the Odyssey could count as a postmodern feminist homage by her standards. More substantial is Berry’s focus on prophecies, par­ticu­larly the notion that they counter the causal logic running through­ out authorized his­tori­cal accounts. Being paranormal, prophecies remain excluded from the industrial age’s canonical chronicles. For this reason, coupled with Mrs. Reynolds’s prophetic fig­ures being women (Saint Odile, Mrs. Reynolds), Berry links prophecies with antifascist discourse. But she forgets that until relatively recently, prophecy was a legitimate historiographic tool. It usually served as the linchpin for many a patriarchal tradition, heralding the coming of male messiahs and conveying their promises of eternal bliss or damnation. Put differently, Berry treats prophecies as one of the “important tactics of intervention, po­liti­cal acts by which the everyday registers resistance to authoritarian structures,”117 without considering how prophecies have a history of being applied by those very structures. When Berry closes her reflection on Mrs. Reynolds with, “Mrs. Reynolds describes neither a passive retreat from history, nor a formal resistance to it. Instead, the novel as a whole functions as a tactical intervention into the works of power itself from the perspective of what those in power have excluded. Stein’s novel does not inhabit a space outside or at the end of history. Rather, it names some places where alternative social forms might be organized, inscribing within the workings of official history the possibility of a future time ‘when everybody forgets to be a f­ ather

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or to have one,’ ” one gets the impression that she isn’t really interested in Stein, but in continental-­style historiographic criticism to which this novel becomes a convenient footnote. By and large, the tone characterizing Diedrich’s and Berry’s stances toward Stein’s historicizing narratives has carried over into the present, if in increasingly insidious forms. Even those scholars who seem content to portray Stein as a writer interested in the his­tori­cal betray a deep-­seated ambivalence toward what that means per se. In “Gertrude Stein’s ‘His­ tori­cal’ Living” (2008), Kelley Wagers recuperates The Making of Ameri­ cans as a po­liti­cally utopian text (instead of as a cut-­and-­dried example of the stuffy realist ethos Berry takes issue with), but her end destination remains virtually identical with Berry’s: like Mrs. Reynolds three decades later, The Making of Ameri­cans “contests his­tori­cal as well as literary conventions [. . .] dislodges continuous progress as the dominant pattern of US history and provides an alternative model for creating national justification through his­tori­cal writing.”119 For Diedrich, Berry, and Wagers, Stein engages with history only insofar as she deconstructs its allegedly rigid linear parameters. While understandable given the his­tori­cal influence of eugenics, white supremacism, and other perilously teleological theories, this attitude betrays not a little naivete regarding the daily practices of historians. It is difficult to construe historiography in such a monolithic light in the process of questioning ideological monoliths. Historians are among the first to identify their craft as the amalgamation of many moving parts and perspectives prone to critique and revision. While protective of Stein’s reputation, and certainly sympathetic readers of her work, Steven Gould Axelrod and John Whittier-­Ferguson share this prevailing hesitance toward “History.” For Axelrod, in “Mrs. Reynolds: Stein’s Anti-­Nazi Novel” (2014), he agrees with Berry’s estimation that “prophecy subverts linear narrative” and its “anchoring notion of linear history,”120 but for a different reason. Prophecies are open to interpretation or “infinitely renegotiable.”121 The novel’s experimental language works to the same end, he adds, “creating a counterworld to Harper’s implacable design.”122 He isn’t entirely off here. When Stein writes to Haas in 1940 (and this missive was briefly quoted in chapter 2), “You see just at pres­ ent I am awfully interested in predictions, wars do make you interested in predictions and that throws a whole lot of light upon the question of description, in a way a prediction, astrological or otherwise is a description [. . .] I am very much interested in the relation of predictions to descriptions [. . .] the relation of Description to Imagination, there is no real separation of course not, even in dreams of course not,”123 she attributes 118



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a literary quality to the prophetic. Predictions contain a descriptive facet. All descriptions rely on the imagination. Therefore, predictions are laced with an imaginative streak. But it remains a leap to say that Stein views all prophecies as purely creative exercises. Nor does she indiscriminately equate the chronological with the claustrophobic. For the Stein who confesses, “We all have been cherishing copies of [Saint Odile’s] prophecy ever since 1940,”124 and who concedes that this vision “was a comfort so of­ten a comfort,”125 prophecies are no light matter. They indicate concrete outcomes that everyone holds their breath for in the present. Their particulars may be flexible, but their overall trajectory is not. At a specific point in time, Germany’s stacked cards will fall. One cannot blunt how literally Stein internalized this time-­sensitive scenario. Stein’s is the voice behind the first-­person outburst “Give me new faces new faces new faces I have seen enough of the old ones today,”126 the biblical fury framing Odile’s prophecy, the reassurance that the musician Leonardo (probably short for Leonardo Blake) “who neither played nor sang nor composed”127 successfully predicted Mrs. Reynolds’s marriage date, and the matching consolation that the “youngest judge in the whole country”128 successfully predicted Mr. Reynolds’s professional achievements. Most persuasively, Stein dedicates Mrs. Reynolds to Saint Odile herself, reminding us in the very last paragraph, “Saint Odile had not been mistaken.”129 Whittier-­Ferguson has studied Stein’s late treatment of the idea of history on and off for around fifteen years. His position is decidedly mixed. His article “Stein in Time: History, Manuscripts, and Memory” (1999) puts forth the view that Mrs. Reynolds juggles both ahis­tori­cal and his­tori­cal impulses. A cast emptied of “motive and psychological depth”130 offsets an “obsession with temporal coordinates.”131 Whittier-­Ferguson concludes that no matter how his­tori­cally minded Stein becomes—how intent she remains on “Angel Harper’s rise to power as a dictator, his advancing age, and his certain death”132—she resists being a narrative writer at heart: Stein gives us very little to take with us, little to remember as we work through the enormous accumulation of her writing. Drafts don’t necessarily evolve. Characters don’t add up to wholes by a novel’s end. Events only sometimes seem to cause or to follow one another. History, insofar as we can discern it as an object of inquiry, happens somewhere else, to subjects other than ourselves. Narrative is a trickle that runs intermittently through Stein’s prose; rarely does it make a stream. We are forced to carry what we know with us as we proceed and to recognize how small the bundle is that holds our knowledge: “after a little while it has been by

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that time.” In Stein’s parsimonious imagining of the subject, there is almost nothing about states of mind that can count itself his­tori­cal.133

He echoes this sentiment two years later in “The Liberation of Gertrude Stein: War and Writing” (2001),134 contending, “Stein’s body of work on the war matters in part because it explores, in the most unpropitious circumstances imaginable, a late and especially explicit iteration of a modernist aesthetic dream: the creation in language, by an author who has effectively vanished—inviolate behind the words on the page—of a sys­tem of relations that does not tell a story, of words moving but never falling into narrative and never, therefore, pulling us into the human, all-­too-­human world where cause and effect brings with it responsibility and anxiety and hope and, ultimately, moral ends.”135 Whittier-­Ferguson may pay lip service to Stein’s wavering between timelessness and bearing testimony in a his­tori­cally situated warzone, yet these tensions aren’t actually real for him. For what he imagines Stein’s most pressing question to be during WWII is: “How to avoid the easy, unpleasant, and unproductive slide into materialism that leads straight to the dullest forms of narrative but yields nothing of aesthetic or philosophical value?”136 The story format is the obstacle Stein must surmount, in his reckoning, if she is to retain her prestige as avant-­garde America’s foremost pioneer. Berry’s value judgments regarding narrative and historiography serenely live on in his essays. By the time one pauses to weigh in ancillary pointers that “positioning [Stein] his­tori­cally requires that we honor fully her resistance to being ‘placed’ his­ tori­cally at all, and we can only honor that resistance by taking it seriously enough to observe Stein’s own writing of that resistance deeply into the details of her narratives,”137 there is barely enough energy left to reregister Stein’s his­tori­cal ambitions (in­clud­ing her admission that masterpieces inevitably “concern themselves about” time138), let alone the critic’s independence from authorial intent. Writing in 2014, Phoebe Stein is the rare critic who takes Stein seriously as an his­tori­cal thinker without rushing to write off the narrative practices that historians employ. Wars I Have Seen epitomizes, for (P.) Stein, a return to history that is far from reluctant or haphazard. It updates can­oni­cal notions of history “by integrating stories of ‘daily living’” into its canals,139 not simply focusing on great men and military imperatives. For war as a his­tori­cal construct has always encompassed civilian experiences for Stein. History is broader in scope and more literary than common sense dictates. While (P.) Stein goes on to enunciate how the memoir disrupts narrative conventions through its repetitions, rhyming, lack of punctuation,



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and garbled dates (mirroring history’s own winds and bends), she does so without lapsing into false reductions. How she frames Stein’s quirks makes all the difference. (P.) Stein refines our appreciation of Stein’s his­ tori­cal spin rather than dismissing history in bulk. History doesn’t necessarily mandate a despotically linear narrative, nor do all linear narratives culminate in despotism.

i Angel Harper is the ultimate modernist, one could say, because he commits to destroying the nineteenth century (at least his real-­life model does in Wars I Have Seen). Haunted by the drowned in a world that grows both icier and fierier under his gaze, he might recall a warped version of ­Antoine de Saint-­Exupéry’s “little prince.” Yet he is a more vicious loner. Angel does “not like either day or night, anything made him nervous”;140 does “not care to eat rabbits or chickens”;141 is unexpectedly a vegetarian; fears guinea hens and windows; believes certain things are “all the same”;142 affirms “he is no Jew” in his sleep;143 commands silence; has a grotesque sense of humor; strikes fear for “never staring [. . .] never looking away”;144 and wishes for the entire earth to drown. Why he evolves into a fig­ure of terror remains a mystery. Whether he turns evil from parental neglect ­(Angel does “not remember whether he was or whether he was not picked up”145 enough as a child), no one knows. But the fact remains that Angel is a “dark cloud”146 captivated by “thunder and lightning”147—and water, the deadliest element of them all. Even as he dreads aloneness from time to time, and even as he yields to weakness, Angel’s solipsism is absolute enough that it permits no friendships, family ties, mates, children, or dreams. Like Ida, he talks to himself, “liking to be alone so he could not fail.”148 He “does not love anyone.”149 “Angel Harper closed his eyes and he opened them again and he knew he never had been married and he had never had any children, and, he knew that if he lost a wedding ring and an engagement ring in his sleep that is if he dreamed that he had lost them it did not make any difference.”150 Aside from during odd moments in his “gentler” childhood when he “liked to be with two or three and have the littlest of them tell him what to do,”151 this solitary instinct persists. In Angel’s lack of interest “in there being a family,”152 he diverges from Joseph Lane, who has a son and is addressed as “our father” by a nameless “they.”153 Although Hitler is identified as one of the “depressing” patriarchs in Everybody’s Autobiography, his literary counterpart poses as something slightly different. Unattached, rather androgynous, and coated in a strange anonymity, Harper resembles (true to

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his namesake) more of, again, a harpy. He drifts about like one of Ida’s moths of death, a lover of black, black veils, and dolls. The darkness that Angel gravitates toward in a trancelike stupor (“Angel Harper never could stay either awake or away and yet in a kind of a way he never slept and if he ever slept he was nervous”154) emits from a dreamless state. For “Angel Harper never had dreamed,” Stein writes, “that is to say if he did dream he did not remember his dream and really on principle he did not dream at all.”155 And when he does remember his dreams, they tend to revolve around the disturbing. They are of­ten of beauty struck down by blight, where suddenly “the one he loved was very ugly.”156 ­Angel’s inability or refusal to dream troubles Mrs. Reynolds to no end, even though she herself occasionally professes to a dreamless, worry-­free sleep. His aversion to the dream realm disquiets her for the same reason it would Breton: it resists the utopian potential dreams can offer. (In Mrs. Reynolds’s case, utopia rests in Saint Odile’s dreams of Germany’s armies being vanquished.) If, for the surrealist, dreams can win us profound creative liberties, they serve no purpose in Angel’s totalitarian imagination. He isn’t a dreamer but a grotesque literalist. That such a literalist comes across in dreamlike terms might seem paradoxical—and it is. It’s of a piece with Stein’s other oxymoronic twists that lend the novel spice: “It is extraordinary how many are killed in a war when everybody is dead”;157 “Angel Harper and Joseph Lane met and never met”;158 and, when sleep eludes Angel, he “puts himself to sleep by spelling out keep awake keep awake keep awake.”159 Mrs. Reynolds lives out the surrealist mantra that “dreams go by contraries or else they do not.”160 But whereas surrealism applies this logic on a grander scale, that is, life should eventually allow for such bends and twists with enough ingenuity, Angel shuts it down. A being from nowhere with no one swoops into the Reynoldses’ world to banish the invigoratingly wondrous forever. The challenge of situating his character in a time and place has everything to do with his reach. As she does for Joseph Lane, who is described as being “older when he was young and then he was all the same,”161 since he lacks a “beginning,”162 Stein origi­nally places Angel outside of time. He exudes an otherworldly timelessness. “Nobody knew just when or how­ Angel Harper was born.”163 “Being born did not interest him and being dead could not happen to him and being married was never a possibility for him and being older as yet was not happening to him and being younger had never happened to him.”164 “He said that weeks and months did not exist for him that days were days and each day made him angry.”165 “Angel Harper when he was fifty-­four did not remember that he had been born



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before.” As the incarnation of death, he takes Ida’s existential amnesia to the next plane: “Angel Harper was not born, to be born, means to be born along and though he followed after he was not born along. / He followed after and after he followed after it was as if he had come and come he did and when he came he remembered his name. / All this sounded very well but he never told it. He could not think in that way, he could not remember, he only remembered what he left. Little by little he tried to remember what he had but he never could, he could only remember what he left.”167 This forgetting escalates after the age of forty-­nine, when “he never again remembered when he had been seven or ten or even when he had been twenty-­one.”168 Four years later, “when Angel Harper was fifty-­three he did not remember that he had ever been fourteen, did not remember it at all.”169 That same year, probably blustering, he claims that “he forgot Joseph Lane.”170 No one seems to know who he is, since he has no past or future with which to ground a personal narrative—at least for a while. His ahis­tori­cal essence ushers in an anonymous air. “It is very likely that nobody knew anything about what Angel Harper was. What was he,”171 Stein ponders. Mr. Reynolds’s brother can never remember what Angel looks like, nor can Mrs. Reynolds summon his hairstyle, hair color, eye shade, or height. But Stein evens out the score over time. There is a beginning, middle, and end to even this mythical-­seeming creature’s narrative arc. The fear of death catches up with him, as Stein notes his rising apprehension before his birthdays. Time triumphs over Angel in a way it never does for Joseph Lane, a character who remains impervious to its effects. (Not only does Angel “not know the age of Joseph Lane,”172 an oversight Mrs. Reynolds takes to be “a kind of triumph,”173 but Lane himself outlasts Harper in the mortality race.) The surrealist cause lives on in a prophetess’s dreams against the most apocalyptic manifestation of Stein’s own craving for an aloneness without end. 166

i Perhaps another way of thinking about Angel Harper and his version of paradise (a world stripped of magic and all communion) is through an unintentional opposition in surrealism itself: boundless sadism versus hope. In Angel’s character, Stein potentially resurrects Sade’s own—the fig­ure commanding such reverence within the surrealist canon. Harper invokes surrealism’s Sadean underbelly, despite the marquis having little interest in the movement’s romantic aspirations (he eschews emotional connections in his erotic rituals) and pacifist origins, surrealism having

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been forged in the First World War’s embers like its immediate predecessor, Dadaism. Surrealists may have bemoaned Dada’s nihilistic energies, yet their penchant for Sade suggests an admiration unmoored from a genuine understanding of the man’s philosophy and temperament. Sade was hardly a man of the people. Despite his brief tenure as a left-­wing official for a Parisian district during the Revolution,174 his battle for personal liberty was always inflected by a patrician disdain for the lower classes. He would have surprised the surrealists themselves, moreover, on the subject of the sublime. For Sade never believed that his philosophy of the flesh would guarantee happiness, free­dom, any byword for the transcendent. Sade is closer to Stein than Breton’s company when it comes to the issue of utopia. Sadean narratives operate as metaphors for the human condition: nothing is enough, with everything losing its wonder upon completion. All life perpetuates such dissatisfaction, an emptiness interspersed with boredom. And today’s model citizen, the “mindfully” well-­adjusted professional of means, would amuse Sade for being so imaginatively impoverished, callow. The human species, in his estimation, remains too wretched to do more than revel in its own excrement for temporary relief. Equally importantly, Sade’s onslaught against sexual puritanism titillated his twentieth-­century acolytes, yet they seemed unwilling to extend his logic to its further reach: a warzone where all combatants exult in the bloodshed at hand. As the opening chapter reflected, war proves a remarkably apt example of the surreal erupting into everyday life. Nothing in surrealism’s history, however, indicates that its practitioners would cross the homicidal threshold. The Age of Gold’s scalping stays onscreen, Bellmer never practiced his art on human limbs, Dominguez’s “electrosexual” sewing machine floats in the same theoretical universe as Kafka’s penal colony, Man Ray’s brass-­tacked flatiron never presses into human flesh, Breton shut down the group séances once they devolved into attempted hangings and knifings,175 and Vaché never terrorized anyone in the end, only himself. Robespierre’s ghost stays cuffed in the shadows. But one digresses. The main point isn’t that surrealism neuters Sade in the process of sanctifying him, but that he holds an uneasy place in its pantheon to begin with. In The Autobiography of Alice B. Toklas, Stein believes surrealism helps Crevel handle his generation’s disillusionment, yet she hints in her last works that surrealism also exists as its symptom. The surrealist taste for rapture incorporates, even if unknowingly, the bloodlust given an outlet by war. Here, then, is where Stein’s journey into surrealism terminates. If Angel begs himself to stay awake in order to fall asleep, Stein fiddles with the dream domain to rouse herself under a hard sun. Her ven-



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ture into surrealism veils an acute hunger for the real. After a nightmarish war, Stein expresses little ardor for battling the dreariness of mundane existence. Instead, she welcomes the pedestrian with both arms. The marvelous, for her, mostly equates with war’s breathtakingly illogical extravagances after all. (And its proponents, the surrealists, largely fled from their terrorist fantasies the moment they went live: Breton, Ernst, Duchamp, and Chagall left for New York; Dalí floated around the East Coast as well; Péret landed in Mexico; Miró escaped to Spain; Arp relocated to Switzerland; Man Ray settled down in Los Angeles.) The postwar Stein invests in surrealism on the road to inverting the surrealist project: beyond harnessing the power of dreams in a world where their logic defines her day-­to-­day life, the author appeals to a specific subset of prophetic visions to awaken the world from its nightmarish state. In this measured approach toward the unconscious, Stein is more Freudian, as previously mentioned, than the surrealists ever were. They imagined the unconscious stored away fertile secrets; Freud, a bevy of animal instincts. Desnos would agree with the latter. In his mock-­diary of falling in love with a phantom woman (based on the cabaret singer Yvonne George), “Journal d’une apparition” (1927), the pleasure of the dream eventually withers. A spectral presence who lives only in one’s mind becomes tedious after a while. So Desnos’s lover first turns violent, then simply drifts off into a dreamless slumber over the passing months—bored, vaguely dissatisfied by his own delusions.

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losing with Sade’s equivocal image among surrealists nuances the claim that Stein holds conflicting feelings regarding her own surrealist tendencies on account of understanding surrealism primarily as a sadistic construct, a phenomenon indebted to the solipsism radiating from Nazi Germany’s youthful troops. In the process of thinking through the child’s sadism rendered possible by its solipsism as well as the solipsism defining all sadists, Stein may even turn back upon her surrealist inheritance itself by reading Sade a certain way. While Stein was less interested in Sade’s project, both she and her surrealist peers associated the marquis with sinister child fig­ures as they imagined new dreams for the world post-­ Hitler. These dreams coupled the child’s wonder—its brazenness before the unknown—with the adult’s sense of restraint. Most men and women, Stein felt, again, were unwilling to gratuitously escalate violence given their empathetic faculties. Her dreams forged on the anvil of war had assumed the wisdom of hindsight. Stein warns us about what dreams may come in a world that not only has yet to fear the power of mass drownings but remains ill prepared for in­di­vidual losses like Crevel’s untimely passing.

i The previous chapter ends on the angle adopted by Raymond Queneau and Albert Camus, who both glimpsed traces of Nazi-­style totalitarian­ism in Sade’s oeuvre. In an Anglophone context decades later, those such as Roger Shattuck, Michael Richardson, and Laurence L. Bongie would continue this stance, somewhat bewilderingly measuring Sade by whether he lives up to the standards of a philosopher gainfully employed in practical ethics or social policy in today’s culture of consent.1 Theirs is a literalist approach that aligns Sade’s urges with those motivating Junko Furuta’s mutilators, serial killers, hardened rapists, suicidal autoerotic as­phyxiators, mob massacres, or groups of usually young working-­class men taping themselves “running a train” on some “thot.” Sade’s oft-­quoted remark to his wife in a 1781 letter—“Yes, I am a libertine, I admit it freely. I have dreamed of doing everything that it is possible to dream of in that line. But I most certainly have not done all the things I dreamt of and never shall.



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Libertine I may be, but I am not a criminal, I am not a murderer” —rings false in this light. It belongs to his rhetorical strategy of dissimulation before lost opportunities. This Sade is a character lifted straight from James DeMonaco’s home invasion horror flick The Purge (2013), where a dystopian America sanctions all crime for twelve hours once a year. The French nobleman isn’t flirting with death but actively pursuing it. The hand that torches its surroundings without an escape route remains his own. In this anarchic rendering, Sade descends from both the Republic’s Leontius, who was self-­ loathingly desperate to gaze upon corpses, and Thrasymachus, who so agitated Socrates by arguing that vice was more profitable than virtue. This version of Sade likewise descends from those viewers enthralled by the “monstrous” spectacles that Aristotle shudders before in his Poetics.3 Floating in a godless universe, Sade argues for the flesh instead of the conscience as the measure of all things, countering ancient atheists like ­Crito’s Socrates and ­Epicurus. A frequent translator of Sade’s works, David Coward of­ten talks past Sade when he observes how Sade denies the gratification belonging to emotional reciprocity, because Coward mistakes denial for taste. For the true libertine (a genetic condition of­ten accompanied by cynicism, difficulties ejaculating, and chronic boredom, for Sade), such milder tonics pale beside the highs secured through sexual sadism. This Sade becomes modernism’s most fanatically literal terrorist: the corpulent antihero reduces the world’s inhabitants to mere atomic clusters to be combined and torn asunder by his voracious appetites. Sade’s perfect sadist ghoulishly furthers nature’s wheel of life by giving it fresh fodder. He “makes it new” by immolating the old. Beyond reading Sade a certain way, the previous chapter also equates Sade’s quest with its most extreme outcome. But war is nothing like the marquis’s carefully isolated gothic torture chambers that shelter dozens of complacent victims. Its purpose transcends immediate physical and psychological excitation, although both may trickle into the violence occurring on and off the field. Besides, war deifies the lack of in­di­vidual free­dom, reducing soldiers to chessboard pieces. Sade’s own youthful accounts of his combat experiences during the Seven Years’ War are dryly technical, adopting a businesslike tone toward strategic maneuvers as though a seasoned commander himself.4 So the analogy drawn between war and a Sadean playground harbors its own imprecisions. All this is to suggest that the question of how to read Sade remains worthwhile when reflecting upon his surrealist legacy—in Stein’s case, sadism’s manifestations within the surreal construct of war. For Sade’s chal2

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lenge for old and new audiences is that he treads the line between theory and practice, lending the impression of advocating one or both depending on the occasion. On an allegorical level, Sade has been construed as a writer of morality plays. He instructs by way of aversion, planting cautionary tales against hedonistic excess in our age when the discovery of “brain zapping [. . .] destructive urges” is lauded.5 Less reliant on the unsavory connotation that only ethical textbooks can earn a place on our bookshelves, Breton’s Sade styles himself as an iconic nonconformist. Fucking around in ever more inventively fucked-­up ways without giving a fuck, this Sade surfaces as a sexual, and simultaneously po­liti­cal, liberator on the most ambitiously intimate scale, depathologizing the bounds of where the body and imagination can stray. The 120 Days of Sodom, or the School of Liberti­ nage (composed 1785) presents a kingdom of gory marvels, described in an operatic crescendo sung by what amounts to a troupe of fallen Scheherazades before a few deliriously aroused sultans. Then there is Sade, the forefather of Nietzsche and his existential brethren, who illuminates humankind’s potential to viscerally carve out its own fate in the absence of a divine script. Other Sades follow: Sade, the satirist poking fun at the hypocriti­cal clergy and Rousseau’s rose-­tinted lens toward the psyche; Sade, the predictably unfeeling nobleman paying for his preferred pleasures in a century accustomed to pub­lic tortures and executions; Sade, the prisoner obsessively jotting down his escapist fantasies, sputtering with pent­up aggression from being under surveillance by social inferiors for nearly three decades; Sade, the French heir to Locke, Hobbes, and, ironically, the Catholic Church in his brutish view of human nature; Sade, the enlightened atheist; Sade, the moral relativist; Sade, the epistolary humorist; Sade, the playwright and performance artist in love with spectacles; Sade, the early Freudian who tells us something about love’s antisocial energies; and Sade, both the pioneer and adversary of the sex-­positive movement, opening up sexual mores while throwing doubt on whether the sexual act is ever fully safe, whether consent is as cut-­and-­dried an ideal as commonly thought. In the heat of the moment, the penchant for pain may court permanent damage for both parties, even death. Signing up for encounters without safe words, where desire advances through recoil, paralysis, blood-­ soaked spasms, and sneers—the yes, no, maybe, I don’t know swirling together as spots cloud one’s vision—is Sade’s specialty. The way that surrealism deals with such ambiguities is to altruistically defuse Sade’s image and distance him from criminalized sadism. (Sade wanted free­dom only for himself; surrealism, for everyone.) Tempering



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his First Manifesto’s extravagant admissions (“We really live by our fantasies when we give free rein to them”6), Breton writes elsewhere in the same document, “I am willing to admit that [the insane] are, to some degree, victims of their imagination, in that it induces them not to pay attention to certain rules—outside of which the species feels itself threatened—which we are all supposed to know and respect.”7 Certain rules are to remain unthreatened by our fantasies. In a footnote later on, Breton speculates that the surrealist writer may be “charged with slander and libel [. . .] [and] insulting and defaming the army, inciting to murder, rape, etc.”8 “His only defense is claiming that he does not consider himself to be the author of his book”9 (as Sade did with Justine), Breton muses, since it is a psychographic composition. This hypothetical scenario culminates in the words: “What is true for the publication of a book will also hold true for a whole host of other acts as soon as Surrealist methods begin to enjoy widespread favor. When that happens, a new morality must be substituted for the prevailing morality, the source of all our trials and tribulations.”10 The new morality would be less draconian. When Breton ends the First Manifesto with, “Surrealism, such as I conceive of it, asserts our complete noncon­ formism clearly enough so that there can be no question of translating it, at the trial of the real world, as evidence for the defense. It could, on the contrary, only serve to justify the complete state of distraction which we hope to achieve here below. Kant’s absentmindedness regarding women, Pasteur’s absentmindedness about ‘grapes,’ Curie’s absentmindedness with respect to vehicles, are in this regard profoundly symptomatic. [. . .] It is living and ceasing to live that are imaginary solutions. Existence is elsewhere,”11 he proposes an art of disorientation, distraction—free­dom from merely inverting the categories of virtue and vice. In the Second Manifesto, this attitude translates into the decidedly anti-­Sadean call to “rise above the fleeting sentiment of living dangerously and of dying.”12 Despite trumpeting that the “simplest Surrealist act consists of dashing down the street, pistol in hand, and firing blindly, as fast as you can pull the trigger, into the crowd,”13 no one, Breton repeatedly admonishes, should actually do so. The firearm example is simply meant to highlight the “despair,”14 frustration, and anger needed “to lay waste to the ideas of family, country, religion”15 that ushered in the First World War. Stein, on her end, takes no similar steps to extricate Sade from petty or colossal sadistic practices. Allusions to sadism and its relation to art, life, mind/entity, and nature/identity circulate as early on as in The Geo­ graphical History of America, released the year that the Rome-­Berlin Axis

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was established. “Sadism,” Stein states, “is an entirely different matter” from money and politics.16 In the same breath, however, she seems to mumble, “But is it. If it is is it. Sadism may have something to do with human nature and the human mind.”17 The question of sadism continues haunting her: “Sadism no that is not what sadism is,”18 “I was careless about sadism and if not then why not, sadism is not interesting.”19 Unlike “romanticism,” sadism can be neither “interesting” nor a “master-­piece” for “never becoming flat,”20 the quality representative of the mind/entity’s emotional coolness, wandering, and detached experimentalism. From the mid-­1930s till WWII’s wind-­down, Stein prays for Sade’s rhetorical reign to end—his world narrative where adults gratify their violent whims on cue like children, and where children shoulder the grownup burdens of pub­lic execution and mass punishment. As chapter 5 of the present work addresses, children, to her melancholic fascination, now share the adult domain in occupied France, set adrift from school, exposed to hunger (or death at large), and transformed into killers in their own right. WWII’s children subsequently join a lineage of lost generations: Calvinism’s eternally damned infants, the eighteenth century’s feral children, Hobbesian primitives, Victorian street urchins, the childlike savages populating colonial discourse, and so on. Even the Romantics nursed a subtle distrust of child fig­ures. The shadow of origi­nal sin lengthens across William Wordsworth’s Ecclesiastical Sketches (1822) and William Blake’s Vala, or the Four Zoas (1807).21 Surrealism inherits Romanticism’s ambivalence toward childhood. In “Re-­enchantment: Surrealist Discourses of Childhood, Hermeticism, and the Outmoded” (2016), David Hopkins clarifies how surrealism’s child representations aren’t just Romantic ideals that help adults reenchant the world for themselves but uncomfortably Freudian ones. Citing Ernst’s femme-­ enfants in paintings such as Two Children Are Threatened by a Nightingale (1924) and Children’s Games (1942), Bellmer’s fetishistic dolls, Duchamp’s bawdy cartoon drawing Walking Doll (1910), and Joseph Cornell’s Medici boxes and collage films, Hopkins brings to light how surrealism’s child motif “is not without its dark side” in its violently smoldering eroticism, its erotically charged violence.22 Even Walter Benjamin, in the essay “Old Toys: The Toy Exhibition at the Markisches Museum” (1928), marvels at the child’s cruel streak, since children break their toys as a rule of thumb. For Breton, even as he extols the child’s receptiveness to the wondrous, he pulls back from crudely pantomiming this mind-­set. The First Manifesto’s “Children set off each day without a worry in the world. Everything is near at hand, the worst material conditions are fine”23 or



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The mind which plunges into Surrealism relives with glowing excitement the best part of its childhood. For such a mind, it is similar to the certainty with which a person who is drowning reviews once more, in the space of less than a sec­ond, all the insurmountable moments of his life. Some may say to me that the parallel is not very encouraging. But I have no intention of encouraging those who tell me that. From childhood memories, and from a few others, there emanates a sentiment of being unintegrated, and then later of having gone astray, which I hold to be the most fertile that exists. It is perhaps childhood that comes closest to one’s “real life”; childhood beyond which man has at his disposal, aside from his laissez-­passer, only a few complimentary tickets; childhood where everything nevertheless conspires to bring about the effective, risk-­free possession of oneself. Thanks to surrealism, it seems that opportunity knocks a sec­ond time24

never quite culminates in the appeal to recreate childhood “puerility”25 wholesale. The new man and woman are to sublimate childhood’s choicest sensibilities, not sink back into a full-­blown infantilism. “There are fairy tales to be written for adults,” Breton declares.26 “The fabric of adorable improbabilities must be made a trifle more subtle the older we grow.”27 As the Prolegomena to a Third Surrealist Manifesto or Not (1942) reaffirms decades later, there is a difference between the magically childlike and “childish behavior,” the latter a synonym for “weakness.”28 Stein would agree. What becomes apparent during the Second World War is the need for a different kind of adult, not adult-­sized children submerged in their own desires. Surrealism offered Stein a language she could make her own in the effort to describe the world of the minotaur around her. And having traced the contours of its labyrinth, she felt free enough to leave certain things there. Certain doors were to be unopened, certain fruits untried. Peter Pan’s mythic time was to be left behind. Without falling back into the old moral complacencies, Stein hints that there may be another way out. Before a reality irrevocably altered by violence and deprivation, it might be more accurate to say that Stein isn’t imploding the surrealist enterprise, but jiggling it a bit. After the Axis reign, the spirit necessarily becomes more circumspect about which dreams to pursue, and how far it can go without turning back. The trick, as Breton predicted in the late 1920s, lies in teasing out a sense of proportion: “Everything tends to make us believe that there exists a certain point of the mind at which life and death, the real and the imagined, past and future, the communicable and the incommunicable, high and low, cease to be perceived as

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contradictions. Now, search as one may one will never find any other motivating force in the activities of the Surrealists than the hope of finding and fixing this point. From this it becomes obvious how absurd it would be to define Surrealism solely as constructive or destructive: the point to which we are referring is a fortiori that point where construction and destruction can no longer be brandished one against the other.”29 For Stein, this “point of the mind” involves knowing how to be “old fashioned and regular in your daily life” so as to be “way ahead” of your time;30 how to appreciate what is “complicated and interesting”31 about the normal; how to be an adult without losing sight of the child’s creative sensibilities; how to live in the moment with one eye toward the past and future; how to be in, and of, time without feeling overwhelmed by its onward march; how to juggle lonesomeness and social fatigue; how to be one’s own person within a densely interconnected society; how to feel detached yet fully engaged; how to think in a way both “flat” and “round” as a global citizen perpetually in search of open imaginative spaces; and how to be “roundly” rooted in world affairs without feeling suffocated by them. Such spatial rhetoric provides an apt opening to this book’s end. Like Stein, surrealism cherished the free­dom to wander off the beaten path. The off-­grid map lovingly described in The Geographical History of America would be a dreamer’s paradise if it weren’t also framed by grief. Open spaces can evoke absences. In The Geographical History of America, not a little of its elegiac air has to do with Crevel’s passing. If Crevel had let himself wander in a place like America as a true Ameri­can would, Stein contemplates, maybe he wouldn’t have fallen prey to his final depressive episode: “René Crevel was not nervous he really was not excited and that is because he was in a country where no one wanders. [. . .] René Crevel would have liked to have gone to America he always hoped for that. But now he is dead. He killed himself.”32 Other fragments further delineate the impression his absence imparts: Mushrooms are very good to eat. But we never gave any of them to René Crevel. What is the relation of the human mind to a real person who has really lived or one that you mix up with whether he has really never been here or not. We do not change when René Crevel has not been not ever been here yet. Nobody ever heard of him but what has that to do with whether you will be excited about him. Nothing at all nothing at all nothing at all.



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But if he was all made up. Something as well would have to do with human nature. And the human mind. I wonder.33 Being a relation is not a necessary thing. Jo Alsop is he a relation. Perhaps not. René Crevel was. Thornton Wilder is. Sometime some one is as if he were an only son. But is he a son at all. May be he never has been.34

The Geographical History of America mourns Stein’s lost friend, yet much disorientation underpins this loss. With him no longer around, it is as though he were never there at all. Everyone everywhere recedes back into a primordial oblivion—dream figments belonging, perhaps, to those alien beings Breton imagines at the Prologomena’s conclusion. Even The World Is Round’s child heroine, Rose, experiences this existential vertigo, asking herself, “Is it morning or evening [. . .] am I awake or am I in bed,”35 “Am I asleep or am I awake / Have I butter or have I cake, / Am I here or am I there, / Is the chair a bed or is it a chair. / Who is where.”36 Such are the oppositions invoked by Stein’s requiem for Crevel—to have been here, but not really; to only remember having forgotten something; to be asleep through­out one’s life; to be awake in one’s sleep; to grasp why the dream as a metaphor for life harbors such transfiguring potential; by the same token, to catch why this metaphor, if handled indiscriminately, can unleash ancient terrors.

Notes Chapter 1 1. Memorably called “insistence” in her essay “Portraits and Repetition” (1935), this style characterizes pieces such as “Miss Furr and Miss Skeene” (1922) and The Making of Ameri­cans (composed 1903–11, published in 1925). 2. See Joan Retallack, “Introduction,” in Gertrude Stein: Selections, ed. Joan Retallack (Berke­ley: University of California Press, 2008), 27; Linda Wagner-­Martin, “Introduction,” in Three Lives, by Gertrude Stein (Boston: Bedford/St. Martin’s, 2000), 21; Linda Wagner-­Martin, “Favored Strangers”: Gertrude Stein and Her Family (New Brunswick: Rutgers University Press, 1995), 110, 161; Mina Loy, The Last L ­ unar Baedeker, ed. Roger L. Conover (Highlands, NC: Jargon, 1982), 289–99; B ­ ettina L. Knapp, Gertrude Stein (New York: Continuum, 1990), 160; Richard Kostela­netz, “Introduction,” in The Yale Gertrude Stein, ed. Richard Kostelanetz (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1980), xvi, xxx; Derek Attridge, “The Movement of Meaning: Phrasing and Repetition in English Poetry,” in Repetition, ed. Andreas ­Fischer (Tübingen: Narr, 1994), 72–73; William Lundell, “Gertrude Stein: A Radio Interview,” in Gertrude Stein: A Study of the Short Fiction, by Linda S. Watts (New York: Twayne, 1999), 96; Lisa Ruddick, Reading Gertrude Stein: Body, Text, Gnosis (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1990), 74–92, 90–92, 145–46, 151–52; Ulla E. Dydo, with William Rice, Gertrude Stein: The Language That Rises, 1923–1934 (Evanston: North­ west­ern University Press, 2003), 278; Karin Cope, Passionate Collaborations: Learn­ ing to Live with Gertrude Stein (Victoria: ELS Editions, 2005), 141–43; Marianne ­DeKoven, A Different Language: Gertrude Stein’s Experimental Writing (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1983); Sara J. Ford, Gertrude Stein and Wallace Stevens: The Performance of Modern Consciousness (New York: Routledge, 2002), 40, 48; Linda S. Watts, Gertrude Stein: A Study of the Short Fiction (New York: Twayne, 1999); B. F. Skinner, “Has Gertrude Stein a Secret?” Atlantic Monthly 153 (Janu­ary 1934): 50–57; Jayne L. Walker, The Making of a Modernist: Gertrude Stein from Three Lives to Tender Buttons (Amherst: University of Massachusetts Press, 1984), 121–22; Margaret Dickie, Stein, Bishop, and Rich: Lyrics of Love, War, and Place (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1997), 36; Richard Bridgman, Gertrude Stein in Pieces (New York: Oxford University Press, 1970), 106; James R. Mellow, Charmed Circle: Gertrude Stein and Company (Lon­don: Phaidon, 1974), 134. 3. See Kostelanetz, “Introduction,” xxiii; Ruddick, Reading Gertrude Stein, 178; Marjorie Perloff, “Poetry as Word-­System: The Art of Gertrude Stein,” Ameri­can Poetry Review 8, no. 5 (1979): 33–43; Ford, Gertrude Stein, 41. 4. Samuel M. Steward, Dear Sammy: Letters from Gertrude Stein and Alice B. Toklas (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1977), 9. 5. Emily Greenhouse, “Gertrude Stein and Vichy: The Overlooked H ­ istory,” New

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Yorker, May 4, 2012, https://www.newyorker.com/culture/culture-­desk/gertrude -­stein-­and-­vichy-­the-­overlooked-­history. 6. See Dydo, Gertrude Stein, 278–323. 7. Marianne DeKoven, “Gertrude Stein and the Modernist Canon,” in Gertrude Stein and the Making of Literature, ed. Shirley Neuman and Ira B. Nadel (Boston: Northeast­ern University Press, 1988), 10–11. 8. Daniel Albright, Untwisting the Serpent: Modernism in Music, Literature, and Other Arts (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2000), 315. 9. Albright, Untwisting the Serpent, 315–16. 10. See Viktor Shklovsky, Theory of Prose, trans. Benjamin Sher (Champaign, IL: Dalkey Archive Press, 2009). 11. André Breton, First Manifesto, in Manifestos of Surrealism, trans. Richard Seaver and Helen R. Lane (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1969), 81. 12. Gertrude Stein, Wars I Have Seen (Lon­don: Brilliance, 1984), 113–14. 13. For more on Vaché, see Ruth Brandon, Surreal Lives: The Surrealists, 1917– 1945 (Lon­don: Macmillan, 1999), 9–42; Franklin Rosemont, Jacques Vaché and the Roots of Surrealism: Including Vaché’s War Letters & Other Writings (Chicago: Charles H. Kerr, 2008). 14. Christopher J. Knight, The Patient Particulars: Ameri­can Modernism and the Technique of Originality (Lon­don: Associated University Press, 1995), 81. 15. Some instances of Stein’s early typological works would be Fernhurst (composed 1904), Three Lives (1909), and The Making of Ameri­cans (composed 1903–11; see footnote 1). 16. Ida’s same-­sex encounters are suggestive enough to render her sexuality ambiguous. Two pages before the novel ends, for instance, “[Ida] did meet women. When they came she was resting, when they went she was resting, she liked it and they did not mind it. They came again and when they came again, she was obliging, she did say yes. She was sorry she was resting, so sorry and she did say yes. She thought they liked it and they did but it was not the same as if she had ever said no or if she had not always been resting”; see Gertrude Stein, Ida: A Novel, ed. Logan Esdale (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2012), 125. 17. See Dydo, Gertrude Stein, 295–97. 18. Qtd. in William Wasserstrom, “The Sursymamericubealism of Gertrude Stein,” Twentieth-­Century Literature 21, no. 1 (1975): 93. 19. See Brandon, Surreal Lives, 218. 20. Steward, Dear Sammy, 69. 21. For more regarding these four artists, see Colin Rhodes, “Four ‘Outsiders,’ Four Women: Surrealism and the Psychic Elsewhere,” in Angels of Anarchy: Women Artists and Surrealism, ed. Patricia Allmer (Munich: Prestel, 2009), 15–31. 22. For more on surrealism’s gender politics, see Natalya Lusty, Surrealism, Femi­ nism, Psychoanaly­sis (Aldershot: Ashgate, 2007); Patricia Allmer, ed., Angels of An­ archy: Women Artists and Surrealism (Munich: Prestel, 2009); Patricia Allmer, Inter­ sections: Women Artists/surrealism/modernism (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2016).



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23. Gertrude Stein, The Autobiography of Alice B. Toklas (Lon­don: Penguin, 2001), 227–28. 24. Stein, Autobiography of Toklas, 137. 25. Stein, Autobiography of Toklas, 70. 26. See Brandon, Surreal Lives, 9–11. 27. Stein, Autobiography of Toklas, 65. 28. Stein, Autobiography of Toklas, 116. 29. Stein, Autobiography of Toklas, 67. 30. Stein, Autobiography of Toklas, 66. 31. Stein, Autobiography of Toklas, 108–9. 32. Stein, Autobiography of Toklas, 108. 33. Stein, Autobiography of Toklas, 172. 34. Stein, Autobiography of Toklas, 149. 35. Stein, Autobiography of Toklas, 66. 36. Stein, Autobiography of Toklas, 118. 37. Stein, Autobiography of Toklas, 66. 38. Stein, Autobiography of Toklas, 67. 39. Stein, Autobiography of Toklas, 220. 40. Stein, Autobiography of Toklas, 213. 41. Stein, Autobiography of Toklas, 244. 42. Stein, Autobiography of Toklas, 243. 43. Tchelitchew is known to have complained that he was constantly forced to “kowtow to a Jewess” (qtd. in Wagner-­Martin, “Favored Strangers,” 185). 44. Stein, Autobiography of Toklas, 257. 45. Stein, Autobiography of Toklas, 212. 46. Stein, Autobiography of Toklas, 212. 47. Stein, Autobiography of Toklas, 146–47. 48. Stein, Autobiography of Toklas, 130. 49. Qtd. in Janet Bishop, Cécile Debray, and Rebecca Rabinow, eds., The Steins Collect: Matisse, Picasso, and the Parisian Avant-­Garde (New Haven: San Francisco Museum of Modern Art in association with Yale University Press, 2011), 238. 50. Stein, Autobiography of Toklas, 247. 51. Stein, Autobiography of Toklas, 250. 52. Stein, Autobiography of Toklas, 146. 53. Pierre Cabanne, Dialogues with Marcel Duchamp, trans. Ron Padgett (New York: Viking, 1971), 64. 54. Calvin Tomkins, Duchamp (New York: Holt, 1996), 231. 55. Stein, Autobiography of Toklas, 245. 56. Stein, Autobiography of Toklas, 245. 57. Stein, Autobiography of Toklas, 247. 58. Stein, Autobiography of Toklas, 248–49. 59. Stein, Autobiography of Toklas, 250. 60. Stein, Autobiography of Toklas, 256. 61. Stein, Autobiography of Toklas, 245.

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62. Crevel specifically references My Body and I in his correspondence with Stein. At the start of 1927 (month unknown), he writes, “After I want to write an essay like Mon Corps et moi, not on solitude, but on illness, and egoism (its my best quality) and love, and all things”; qtd. in Jean-­Michel Devésa, trans., Correspon­ dance de René Crevel à Gertrude Stein (Paris: L’Harmattan, 2000), 91. That No­vem­ ber, and not a little inconsistently with regard to his book’s subject matter, Crevel jots down, “I am thinking about a new book. Another Mon Corps et moi, a myself examination with things about illness” (Devésa, Correspondance, 120–21). 63. See Devésa, Correspondance, 78–79. 64. René Crevel, My Body and I, trans. Robert Bononno (New York: Archi­pelago, 2005), 71. 65. Crevel, My Body, 82. 66. Crevel, My Body, 67. 67. Crevel, My Body, 70. 68. Crevel, My Body, 134. 69. Crevel, My Body, 33. 70. Devésa, Correspondance, 131. 71. Devésa, Correspondance, 161. 72. Devésa, Correspondance, 206. 73. Crevel, My Body, 42. 74. Crevel, My Body, 117. 75. Crevel, My Body, 103. 76. In a 1933 letter to Janet Flanner, Hemingway writes, “When the menopause hit [Stein] she got awfully damned patriotic about sex. The first stage was that nobody was any good that wasn’t that way. The sec­ond was that anybody that was that way was good. The third was that anybody that was any good must be that way. Patriotism is a hell of a vice”; see Ernest Hemingway, Selected Letters, 1917–1961, ed. Carlos Baker (Lon­don: Granada, 1981), 387–88. 77. Crevel, My Body, 29–30. 78. Crevel, My Body, 68. 79. Crevel, My Body, 38. 80. Crevel, My Body, 137. 81. Crevel, My Body, 27. 82. Crevel, My Body, 145. 83. René Crevel, Diderot’s Harpsichord, in Œuvres complètes, Tome 1, ed. Maxime Morel (Paris: Éditions du Sandre, 2014), 757. 84. Crevel, Diderot’s Harpsichord, 758. 85. Crevel, Diderot’s Harpsichord, 756. 86. Crevel, Diderot’s Harpsichord, 756. 87. Crevel, Diderot’s Harpsichord, 804. 88. Crevel, Diderot’s Harpsichord, 745. 89. Crevel, Diderot’s Harpsichord, 745. 90. See Devésa, Correspondance, 143. 91. See Devésa, Correspondance, 212–13.



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92. See Devésa, Correspondance, 218. 93. Comte de Lautréamont, Les Chants de Maldoror, trans. Alexis Lykiard (New York: Thomas Y. Crowell, 1972), 177. 94. Stein, Autobiography of Toklas, 100–1. 95. Stein, Autobiography of Toklas, 118. 96. Roger Shattuck, “Introduction,” in The History of Surrealism, by Maurice Naudeau (Lon­don: Jonathan Cape, 1968), 32. 97. For more on graphic sexual imagery created by women surrealists, see ­Candice Black, ed., Sade: Sex and Death: The Divine Marquis & The Surrealists (Chicago: Solar Books, 2011), 27–31; Allmer, Angels. 98. Letter from Rimbaud to Paul Demeny, May 15, 1871; qtd. in Brandon, Sur­ real Lives, 16. 99. For more on Stein’s euphemisms, see Dydo, Gertrude Stein, 23–34. 100. Gertrude Stein, Alphabets and Birthdays (New York: Books for Libraries Press, 1969), 101. 101. Robert Desnos, Calixto, trans. Todd Sanders (Pittsburgh: Air and Nothingness Press, 2004), 59. 102. Marc Chagall, My Life (Lon­don: Peter Owen, 1965), 77. 103. André Breton, Nadja, trans. Richard Howard (New York: Grove, 1960), 42. 104. Desnos, Calixto, 45. 105. Desnos, Calixto, 47. 106. Breton, Nadja, 39. 107. Robert Desnos, Essential Poems and Writings of Robert Desnos, ed. Mary Ann Caws (Boston: Black Widow, 2007), 16. 108. Robert Desnos, Liberty or Love! trans. Terry Hale (Lon­don: Atlas, 1993), 41–42. 109. Desnos, Liberty, 91. 110. Desnos, Liberty, 92. 111. Desnos, Liberty, 87. 112. Breton, Nadja, 160. 113. Qtd. in Maurice Nadeau, The History of Surrealism, trans. Richard Howard (Lon­don: Jonathan Cape, 1968), 69. 114. Stein, Wars, 12. 115. Stein, Wars, 104–5. 116. Stein, Wars, 70. 117. For more on how Breton’s circle played off of the French canon, see Simon Baker, Surrealism, History and Revolution (Oxford: Peter Lang, 2007). 118. Gertrude Stein, Paris France (New York: Liveright, 1996), 72. 119. Stein, Wars, 26.

Chapter 2

1. Stein, Autobiography of Toklas, 228. 2. Breton, Manifestos, 26. 3. Breton, Manifestos, 27–28, emphasis origi­nal.

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4. Christopher Isherwood, Goodbye to Berlin (New York: New Directions, 2012), 3. 5. Qtd. in Brandon, Surreal Lives, 84. 6. Gertrude Stein, A Primer for the Gradual Understanding of Gertrude Stein, ed. Robert Bartlett Haas (Los Angeles: Black Sparrow, 1971), 31. 7. Stein, Autobiography of Toklas, 82. 8. Stein, Autobiography of Toklas, 83. 9. Qtd. in Michael J. Hoffman, ed., Critical Essays on Gertrude Stein (Boston: G. K. Hall, 1986), 27–28. 10. For examples of Stein-­Picasso readings, see David Antin, “Some Questions about Modernism,” Occident 8 (1974): 6–39; Randa Dubnick, The Structure of Obscurity: Gertrude Stein, Language, and Cubism (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1984); L. T. Fitz, “Gertrude Stein and Picasso: The Language of Surfaces,” Ameri­can Literature 45, no. 2 (1973): 228–37; Michael J. Hoffman, The Develop­ ment of Abstractionism in the Writings of Gertrude Stein (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1965); Perloff, “Poetry as Word-­System”; Marilyn Gaddis Rose, “Gertrude Stein and the Cubist Narrative,” Modern Fiction Studies 22 (1977): 543– 55; Stephen Scobie, “The Allure of Multiplicity: Metaphor and Metonymy in Cubism and Gertrude Stein,” in Gertrude Stein and the Making of Literature, ed. Shirley Neuman and Ira B. Nadel (Boston: Northeast­ern University Press, 1988), 98–118; Wendy Steiner, Exact Resemblance to Exact Resemblance: The Literary Portraiture of Gertrude Stein (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1978); Wylie Sypher, Rococo to Cubism in Art and Literature (New York: Vintage, 1960); Wasserstrom, “Sur­syma­ meri­cubealism”; Edmund Wilson, Axel’s Castle: A Study in the Imaginative Litera­ ture of 1870–1930 (New York: Charles Scribner’s Sons, 1936), 237–56. Antin and Perloff, in particular, considerably refine this verbal-­visual parallel. 11. Stein, Primer, 24–25. 12. See Thornton Wilder, “Gertrude Stein Makes Sense,” in Ida: A Novel, ed. Logan Esdale (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2012), 286–87, 290, emphasis origi­nal. This being said, even Stein’s champions such as Wilder experienced crises of faith. During Steward’s visit to Zurich in 1937, Wilder confessed to him, “But I really can’t understand her writing. Try as I may, there are clouds and darkness over the land, so much of it. [. . .] She is very clear to me when she speaks about writing and thinking. And in much of her writing I feel the authority of what she says, even though it may not be at all clear to me”; see Samuel M. Steward, Chap­ ters from an Autobiography (San Francisco: Grey Fox Press, 1981), 72. 13. E. H. Gombrich, Art and Illusion (Lon­don: Phaidon, 1962), 314. 14. Catharine R. Stimpson, “Gertrude Stein: Humanism and Its Freaks,” bound­ ary 2, no. 12/13 (1984): 315. 15. Neil Schmitz, “Gertrude Stein as Post-­Modernist: The Rhetoric of Tender Buttons,” Journal of Modern Literature 3, no. 5 (1974): 1206. 16. Gertrude Stein, Lectures in America (Lon­don: Virago, 1988), 238, 246. 17. Gertrude Stein, Look at Me Now and Here I Am: Writings and Lectures, 1909– 45, ed. Patricia Meyerowitz (Lon­don: Penguin, 1990), 163.



notes

175

18. Stein, Look at Me Now, 196. 19. Stein, Look at Me Now, 195. 20. Stein, Primer, 15. Stein jointly owned a number of Cézannes during her lifetime, in­clud­ing the famous Madame Cézanne with a Fan (1881). For a brief survey regarding the Steins’ Cézanne collection back in the day, see John Rewald, ­Cézanne, the Steins, and Their Circle (Lon­don: Thames and Hudson), 1986. 21. For a comprehensive study of Cézanne’s trademark techniques, see Richard Shiff, Cézanne and the End of Impressionism: A Study of the Theory, Technique, and Critical Evaluation of Modern Art (Chicago: University of Chicago Press), 1984. 22. See John Rewald, Paul Cézanne: Letters (New York: Hacker Art, 1984), 3­ 09–13. 23. Edmond and Jules de Goncourt, Pages from the Goncourt Journal, ed. Robert Baldick (Lon­don: Oxford University Press, 1962), 1188. 24. John Ruskin, The Elements of Drawing, ed. Bernard Dunstan (Lon­don: Her­ bert, 2006), 18, emphasis origi­nal. 25. De Goncourt, Journal, 80. 26. De Goncourt, Journal, 270, emphasis origi­nal. 27. The Goncourts were two of Zola’s origi­nal mentors, and during Edmond’s later years following Jules’s death, he drew closer to the very ideas he inspired in his onetime pupil. 28. De Goncourt, Journal, xxi, emphasis origi­nal. 29. De Goncourt, Journal, xxii, emphasis origi­nal. 30. See also De Goncourt, Journal, 101, 106–7, 324, 337, and 357. 31. De Goncourt, Journal, 285. 32. Tellingly, Cézanne himself proclaimed in a missive to his son, “Long live the Goncourts, Pissarro, and all those who love colour, the representative of light and air” (August 3, 1906; Rewald, Paul Cézanne: Letters, 318). 33. Gertrude Stein, Picasso, in Gertrude Stein: Writings, 1932–1946, ed. C ­ atharine R. Stimpson and Harriet Chessman (New York: Library of America, 1998), 504–5. 34. Cézanne in a letter to Bernard, 1905, unspecified day and month; Rewald, Paul Cézanne: Letters, 311. 35. Cézanne in a letter to Bernard, Oc­to­ber 23, 1905; Rewald, Paul Cézanne: Letters, 313. 36. Stein, Picasso, 507. 37. Stein, Picasso, 508. 38. For more on this topic, see Harry R. Garvin, “The Human Mind & Tender Buttons,” in Gertrude Stein Advanced: An Anthology of Criticism, ed. Richard Kostela­ netz (Jefferson, NC: McFarland, 1990), 85–88; Ariane Mildenberg, “Openings: Epoché as Aesthetic Tool in Modernist Texts,” in Phenomenology, Modernism and Be­ yond, ed. Carole Bourne-­Taylor and Ariane Mildenberg (Oxford: Peter Lang, 2010), 41–73; Ariane Mildenberg, “Seeing Fine Substances Strangely: Phenomenology in Gertrude Stein’s Tender Buttons,” Studia Phaenomenologica 8 (2008): 259–82; Peter Quartermain, Disjunctive Poetics: From Gertrude Stein and Louis Zukofsky to Susan Howe (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1992).

176

notes

39. Stein, Picasso, 528. 40. Stein, Picasso, 509. 41. Lyn Hejinian, The Language of Inquiry (Berke­ley: University of California Press, 2000), 104. 42. See, for instance, Martin Heidegger, Being and Time, trans. John Macquarrie and Edward Robinson (Oxford: Basil Blackwell, 1962); Hans-­Georg Gadamer, Philosophical Hermeneutics, trans. David E. Linge (Berke­ley: University of California Press, 1976); Lawrence Ferrara, Philosophy and the Analysis of Music: Bridges to Mu­ sical Sound, Form, and Reference (New York: Greenwood, 1991). 43. Qtd. in Linda Nochlin, ed., Realism and Tradition in Art, 1848–1900: Sources and Documents (Eaglewood Cliffs: Prentice-­Hall, 1966), 166. 44. Nochlin, Realism, 168. 45. De Goncourt, Journal, 40. 46. De Goncourt, Journal, 266. 47. De Goncourt, Journal, 335. 48. Janu­ary 24, 1904; Rewald, Paul Cézanne: Letters, 294. 49. For commentary on how Bernard somewhat distorted Cézanne’s image into that of a symbolist mystic, incorrectly insinuating that Cézanne totally broke with impressionist ideals, see Shiff, Cézanne; Rewald, Paul Cézanne: Letters (endnotes). Bernard projected many of his own aesthetic abstractions onto Cézanne, and it is his Cézanne who has largely been passed down to the modernists, notwithstand­ ing Cézanne’s own reservations regarding Bernard’s academic tone. 50. 1905, unspecified day and month; Rewald, Paul Cézanne: Letters, 311. 51. Gombrich, Art and Illusion, 169. 52. For a definitive exposé regarding photography’s nonrepresentational properties, see Susan Sontag, On Photography (Lon­don: Penguin, 2002). 53. Gadamer, Philosophical Hermeneutics, 62. 54. Mildenberg, “Openings,” 50. 55. Mildenberg, “Openings,” 64. 56. “Transatlantic Interview” excerpt; qtd. in Walker, Making, 13. 57. Tender Buttons excerpt, qtd. in Walker, Making, 142. 58. Qtd. in Robert Bartlett Haas, “Preface,” in How Writing Is Written, by Gertrude Stein (Los Angeles: Black Sparrow, 1974), n. pag. 59. Stein, Lectures in America, 199. 60. Stein, Lectures in America, 61. 61. Stein, Lectures in America, 63. 62. Stein, Lectures in America, 80. 63. Stein, Lectures in America, 68. 64. Stein, Lectures in America, 69. 65. Stein, Lectures in America, 71. 66. Stein, Lectures in America, 71. 67. Stein, Lectures in America, 73. 68. Stein, Lectures in America, 75.



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69. Stein, Lectures in America, 75. 70. Stein, Lectures in America, 72. 71. Stein, Lectures in America, 73. 72. Stein, Lectures in America, 77. 73. Stein, Lectures in America, 79. 74. Walker, Making, 13. 75. Walker, Making, xiv. 76. Edward M. Burns and Ulla E. Dydo, with William Rice, eds., The Letters of Gertrude Stein and Thornton Wilder (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1996), 402. 77. Burns and Dydo, Letters, 402. 78. Stein, Picasso, 524. 79. Stein, Picasso, 507. 80. Stein, Picasso, 507. 81. Stein, Picasso, 522. 82. Stein, Picasso, 519–20. 83. Stein, Picasso, 505. 84. Stein, Picasso, 497. 85. See, for instance, Moshe Barasch, Theories of Art, 3: From Impressionism to Kandinsky (New York: Routledge, 2000), 11–78; Gombrich, Art and Illusion; Walker, Making, 1–18. 86. 1861; Nochlin, Realism, 35. 87. Stein, Picasso, 504. 88. Stein, Picasso, 533.

Chapter 3 1. Tristan Tzara, Approximate Man and Other Writings, trans. Mary Ann Caws (Detroit: Wayne State University Press, 1973), 139. 2. Tzara, Approximate Man, 142. 3. Gertrude Stein, Two: Gertrude Stein and Her Brother, and Other Early Por­ traits (1908–12) (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1951), 91. 4. Tzara, Approximate Man, 141. 5. Tzara, Approximate Man, 143. 6. Tzara, Approximate Man, 143. 7. Tzara, Approximate Man, 138. 8. Tzara, Approximate Man, 138. 9. Tzara, Approximate Man, 140. 10. Tzara, Approximate Man, 141. 11. Tzara, Approximate Man, 140. 12. Tzara, Approximate Man, 141. 13. Tzara, Approximate Man, 142. 14. Tzara, Approximate Man, 143. 15. Tzara, Approximate Man, 143. 16. Tzara, Approximate Man, 144.

178

notes

17. David Gascoyne, A Short Survey of Surrealism (Plymouth: Frank Cass, 1970), 153–54. 18. André Breton and Philippe Soupault, The Magnetic Fields, trans. David Gascoyne (Lon­don: Atlas, 1985), 44. 19. Breton and Soupault, Magnetic Fields, 55. 20. Crevel, Diderot’s Harpsichord, 743. 21. Crevel, Diderot’s Harpsichord, 760. 22. Crevel, Diderot’s Harpsichord, 763. 23. Crevel, Diderot’s Harpsichord, 767. 24. Crevel, Diderot’s Harpsichord, 771. 25. Crevel, Diderot’s Harpsichord, 774. 26. Crevel, My Body, 35. 27. Crevel, My Body, 35–36. 28. Crevel, My Body, 36. 29. Devésa, Correspondance, 82. 30. Devésa, Correspondance, 83. 31. Devésa, Correspondance, 92–93. 32. Devésa, Correspondance, 101. 33. Late 1928–early 1929; Devésa, Correspondance, 149. 34. Robert Desnos, Rrose Sélavy, trans. Timothy Adès, Papers of Surrealism 9 (Summer 2011): n. pag. https://www.research.manchester.ac.uk/portal/files/63517393 /surrealism_issue_9.pdf. 35. Desnos, Rrose Sélavy. 36. Desnos, Rrose Sélavy. 37. Desnos, Rrose Sélavy. 38. Desnos, Rrose Sélavy. 39. Desnos, Rrose Sélavy. 40. Desnos, Rrose Sélavy. 41. Desnos, Rrose Sélavy. 42. Desnos, Rrose Sélavy. 43. Desnos, Rrose Sélavy. 44. Desnos, Rrose Sélavy. 45. Desnos, Rrose Sélavy. 46. Desnos, Rrose Sélavy. 47. Desnos, Rrose Sélavy. 48. Desnos, Rrose Sélavy. 49. Desnos, Rrose Sélavy. 50. Gertrude Stein, Bee Time Vine and Other Pieces [1913–1927] (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1953), 83. 51. Desnos, Rrose Sélavy. 52. Desnos, Rrose Sélavy. 53. Desnos, Rrose Sélavy. 54. Desnos, Rrose Sélavy.



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55. Desnos, Rrose Sélavy. 56. Desnos, Rrose Sélavy. 57. Robert Desnos, The Voice of Robert Desnos: Selected Poems, trans. William Kulik (Riverdale-­on-­Hudson, NY: The Sheep Meadow, 2004), 179. 58. See Katharine Conley, Robert Desnos, Surrealism, and the Marvelous in Every­ day Life (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 2003), 121–67. 59. Gertrude Stein, The Yale Gertrude Stein, ed. Richard Kostelanetz (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1980), 10. 60. Stein, Yale Gertrude Stein, 19. 61. Gertrude Stein, How Writing Is Written, ed. Robert Bartlett Haas (Los Angeles: Black Sparrow, 1974), 157. 62. Gertrude Stein, Geography and Plays (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1993), 75. 63. Stein, Geography and Plays, 75. 64. Stein, Geography and Plays, 77. 65. Stein, Geography and Plays, 78. 66. Stein, Geography and Plays, 79. 67. Stein, Geography and Plays, 81. 68. Stein, Alphabets and Birthdays, 100. 69. Stein, Alphabets and Birthdays, 100. 70. “Dahomy or As Soft a Noise (a serial)” (composed 1924); see Stein, Alpha­ bets and Birthdays, 172. 71. Stein, How Writing, 155. 72. Stein, Look at Me Now, 91. 73. Gertrude Stein, The Making of Ameri­cans (Normal, IL: Dalkey, 1995), 17. 74. Stein, Making of Ameri­cans, 79. 75. Stein, Making of Ameri­cans, 441–42. 76. Stein, Making of Ameri­cans, 460. 77. Stein, Making of Ameri­cans, 702. 78. Stein, Making of Ameri­cans, 924. 79. Breaks between excerpts are marked. 80. Gertrude Stein, Matisse Picasso and Gertrude Stein with Two Shorter Stories (Barton, VT: Something Else, 1972), 185. 81. Stein, Look at Me Now, 25. 82. Stein, Look at Me Now, 29. 83. “How Writing Is Written”; Stein, How Writing, 155. 84. Gertrude Stein, A Novel of Thank You (New York: Books for Libraries Press, 1958), 53. 85. Stein, Look at Me Now, 59. 86. Steward, Dear Sammy, 24–25. 87. Steward, Dear Sammy, 25. 88. To qualify, the first paper was composed entirely by Leon M. Solomons even though Stein is listed as a coauthor. For a facsimile of both articles, see Robert A.

180

notes

Wilson, ed., Motor Automatism (New York: Phoenix Book Shop, 1969). For more on Solomons, see Brenda Wineapple, Sister Brother: Gertrude and Leo Stein (New York: G. P. Putnam’s Sons, 1996). 89. The 1898 inquiry that Stein exclusively authored extends the insights gathered from the origi­nal project across a larger pool (ninety-­one subjects instead of two), with the by-­now-­outdated emphasis on character profiles. 90. Wilson, Motor Automatism, 21–22. 91. New York Evening Globe, March 16, 1916; qtd. in Karen Leick, Gertrude Stein and the Making of an Ameri­can Celebrity (New York: Routledge, 2009), 24. 92. New York City Call, June 7, 1914; qtd. in Leick, Gertrude Stein, 46. 93. Gertrude Stein, Everybody’s Autobiography (Cambridge, MA: Exact Change, 1993), 275. 94. Letter to Ellery Sedgwick, qtd. in Leick, Gertrude Stein, 162. 95. Stein, Autobiography of Toklas, 87. 96. Skinner, “Has Gertrude Stein,” 55. 97. Skinner, “Has Gertrude Stein,” 55. 98. Skinner, “Has Gertrude Stein,” 56. 99. Skinner, “Has Gertrude Stein,” 57. 100. Stein, Autobiography of Toklas, 57. 101. Skinner, “Has Gertrude Stein,” 52. 102. Skinner, “Has Gertrude Stein,” 53. 103. “Reflections on Poetry” (1944), in Desnos, Voice of Robert Desnos, 77. 104. Gertrude Stein, “What Are Master-­pieces and Why Are There So Few of Them,” in Gertrude Stein: Writings, 1932–1946, ed. Catharine R. Stimpson and Harriet Chessman (New York: Library of America, 1998), 359. 105. Stein’s “mammon” is a precursor to her concept of nature/identity developed in the essay “What Is English Literature” (1935) and extended prose poem Four in America (composed 1933). “The difference between serving god and mammon,” Stein elucidates in “What Is English Literature,” is that the former requires complete origi­nality without thought for “earning anything” (Stein, Gertrude Stein, 222–23). Mammon, conversely, encourages greed at the expense of artistic in­tegrity. 106. Viola Spolin, Improvisation for the Theater: A Handbook of Teaching and Di­ recting Techniques (Evanston: Northwest­ern University Press, 1963), 4. 107. Spolin, Improvisation, 4. 108. Spolin, Improvisation, 24. 109. For more on how Stein’s lifelong pursuit of celebrity contradicted her insular statements, see Timothy W. Galow, Writing Celebrity: Stein, Fitzgerald, and the Modern(ist) Art of Self-­Fashioning (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2011); and Leick, Gertrude Stein. 110. Stein, Autobiography of Toklas, 213. 111. Stein, Autobiography of Toklas, 254. 112. Stein, Autobiography of Toklas, 259.



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113. Stein, Autobiography of Toklas, 262–63. 114. Stein, Autobiography of Toklas, 264. 115. Stein, How Writing, 63–64. 116. Galow, Writing Celebrity, 107. 117. See Leick, Gertrude Stein, 193–98. 118. See Leick, Gertrude Stein; Stein, Wars; Brooks Landon, “‘Not Solve It but Be In It’: Gertrude Stein’s Detective Stories and the Mystery of Creativity,” Ameri­ can Literature 53, no. 3 (1981): 487–98. 119. Marjorie Perloff, Wittgenstein’s Ladder: Poetic Language and the Strangeness of the Ordinary (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1996), 257. 120. While acknowledging Husserl’s presence in Santayana’s later years, Santayana biographer John McCormick attributes the main inspiration for Santa­yana’s “theory of essence” to “a lecture on [William] James’s on Herbert Spencer”; John McCormick, George Santayana: A Biography (New York: Knopf, 1987), 57. (For how Santayana read and reacted to Husserl in the 1920s and 30s, see McCormick, George Santayana, 311, 319, 470–71, 479.) The Spencer lecture brought to Santayana’s attention that “things change from forms that for our sense and language would not be recognizable or namable into forms that we can distinguish and name. This happens sometimes, not because things grow more definite, but because our senses and imagination have a limited range and can arrest one form of things rather than another; so that the world grows definite for us when we are able to perceive more parts of it and their relations”; George Santayana, Persons and Places: Frag­ ments of Autobiography, ed. William G. Holzberger and Herman J. Saatkamp Jr. (Cambridge: MIT Press, 1986), 233. It was through James’s Principles of Psychology, coupled with Hegel’s Phenomenology of Spirit, that Santayana became interested during the late 1880s in ideal universals circulating in consciousness. This isn’t to say that Santayana deferred to James at all times in his own philosophizing. See McCormick, George Santayana, 85–97 for Santayana’s movement away from this notable mentor. 121. Despite key similarities—an interest in human psychology, ethnic outsidership, and homosexuality—Stein and Santayana weren’t particularly intimate, according to McCormick. Decades after Stein had left Harvard, Santayana even confided to a friend that he found Stein’s writing to be unsophisticated. Responding to George Sturgis’s opinion that The Realm of Matter was incoherent, Santayana wrote in a letter, “Of course if you choose the wrong passages, and don’t know the vocabulary nor the context, you may sometimes feel a certain cerebral emptiness . . . but that would happen if you were reading an infantile writer like Miss Gertrude Stein” (De­cem­ber 9, 1929; qtd. in McCormick, George Santayana, 305). 122. Santayana once wrote of James, “What I learned from him was perhaps chiefly things which explicitly he never taught, but which I imbibed from the spirit and background of his teaching […] a sense for the immediate: for the unadulterated, unexplained, instant fact of experience. Actual experience, for William James

182

notes

[. . .] possessed a vital, leaping, globulary unity which made the only fact, the flying fact, of our being”; George Santayana, The Philosophy of George Santayana, ed. Paul Arthur Schilpp (LaSalle, IL: Open Court, 1971), 15. 123. See George Santayana, The Letters of George Santayana, Book One, 1868– 1909, ed. William G. Holzberger (Cambridge: MIT Press, 2001), 140; McCormick, George Santayana, 101; Mellow, Charmed Circle, 28. 124. Wagner-­Martin, “Favored Strangers,” 32. 125. See George Santayana, The Realm of Essence: Book First of Realms of Being (Lon­don: Constable, 1928), 168–74; George Santayana, Scepticism and Animal Faith: Introduction to a System of Philosophy (Lon­don: Constable, 1923), viii, ix. 126. Santayana, Realm of Essence, 41. 127. Santayana, Realm of Essence, 6–7. 128. Santayana, Realm of Essence, 9–10. 129. “Composition as Explanation,” in Stein, Look at Me Now, 24. 130. Stein, Look at Me Now, 143, 147. 131. Rumi, Rumi: Swallowing the Sun, trans. Franklin D. Lewis (Lon­don: Oneworld, 2013), 146. 132. Qtd. in Stefan Collini, ed., Interpretation and Overinterpretation: Umberto Eco with Richard Rorty, Jonathan Culler, and Christine Brooke-­Rose (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1992), 47. 133. During one of her many walks with Steward through the Bilignin countryside, Stein is said to have clarified what she meant by her rose mantra in the following manner: “Poetry is made up of the addressing, the caressing, the possessing, and the expressing of nouns. Now when the poet first used the word ‘rose’ it called up a beautiful picture to the reader. But gradually as the years went by it meant less and less and there was no meaning at all and no reader could ever see a rose. Now when I wrote ‘Rose is a rose is a rose’ I slowly brought the meaning back to the word by repetition, I put the picture back in the word and I am the first person in two hundred years to do that thing” (Steward, Dear Sammy, 24).

Chapter 4 1. Retitled Survival in Auschwitz for Ameri­can audiences. 2. Gertrude Stein, Mrs. Reynolds and Five Earlier Novelettes (New York: Books for Libraries Press, 1969), 194. 3. Stein, Mrs. Reynolds, 49. 4. Stein, Wars, 51. 5. Stein, Wars, 54. 6. Stein, Wars, 56. 7. Stein, Wars, 114. 8. See Janet Malcolm, Two Lives: Gertrude and Alice (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2007), 99. 9. For details regarding these French sources, see Malcolm, Two Lives, 97–102. 10. See Sonia Melnikova-­Raich, “Exhibit Leaves Out How Gertrude Stein Sur-



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vived Holocaust,” JWeekly.com, June 9, 2011, https://www.jweekly.com/2011/06/10 /exhibit-­leaves-­out-­how-­gertrude-­stein-­survived-­holocaust; Mark Karlin, “Gertrude Stein’s ‘Missing’ Vichy Years,” Buzzflash Blog, Oc­to­ber 2, 2011; Bill Berkowitz, “Did You Know Gertrude Stein Allegedly Advocated Adolf Hitler for a Nobel Peace Prize? It Gets Worse,” Buzzflash Blog, Sep­tem­ber 12, 2011; Philip Kennicott, “Gertrude Stein in Full Form at Portrait Gallery,” Wash­ing­ton Post, Oc­to­ber 21, 2011; Allen Ellenzweig, “Auntie Semitism at the Met: Gertrude Stein’s Ties to Nazis, Revisited at the Museum, Shouldn’t Eclipse Her Nurturing of Young Artists,” Tablet, May 8, 2012, https://www.tabletmag.com/jewish-­arts-­and-­culture/books/98937/auntie -­semitism-­at-­the-­met; Michael Kimmelman, “Missionaries,” New York Review of Books, April 26, 2012, https://www.nybooks.com/articles/2012/04/26/missionaries; Alexander Nazaryan, “Gertrude Stein Exhibit at the Met Will Now Allude to Her Hitler-­Loving Past and Collaboration with Vichy Regime,” Daily News, May 2, 2012; Natasha Mozgovaya, “Obama Corrects Controversial Jewish Heritage Month Proclamation,” Haaretz, May 3, 2012, https://www.haaretz.com/jewish/1.5218987; Peter Worthington, “Stein Way of Life a Myth,” Toronto Sun, May 26, 2012. See also Scott Heller, “A Study Shows That Gertrude Stein Backed the Vichy Government during World War II,” Chronicle of Higher Education, Oc­to­ber 18, 1996, although his news brief precedes this media scandal by a good fifteen years or so. 11. Alan M. Dershowitz, “Suppressing Ugly Truth for Beautiful Art,” Huffington Post, May 1, 2012, https://www.huffpost.com/entry/met-­gertrude-­stein-­collaborator _b_1467174. 12. Dershowitz, “Suppressing Ugly Truth.” 13. Qtd. in Hunter Walker, “Local Politicians Get Met to ‘Disclose Gertrude Stein’s Nazi Past,’” Observer, May 1, 2012. 14. See Mozgovaya, “Obama.” 15. See Wagner-Martin, “Favored Strangers”; Wineapple, Sister Brother; Dydo, Gertrude Stein; Mellow, Charmed Circle; John Malcolm Brinnin, The Third Rose: Gertrude Stein and Her World (Reading, MA: Addison-­Wesley, 1987); Lucy Daniel, Gertrude Stein (Lon­don: Reaktion, 2009); Diana Souhami, Gertrude and Alice (Lon­ don: Pandora, 1991). 16. Steward, Dear Sammy, 61. 17. See, for instance, Malcolm, Two Lives, 212–13; Christopher Sawyer-­Lauçanno, The Continual Pilgrimage: Ameri­can Writers in Paris, 1944–1960 (New York: Grove, 1992), 46–66; Wagner-­Martin, “Favored Strangers,” 257. 18. Stein, Wars, 114. For more on Faÿ’s role as the couple’s protector, see Burns and Dydo, Letters, 411; Malcolm, Two Lives, 49–55, 65–70. As verified by Maurice Sivan, Belley’s sous-­préfet during Stein’s time, Faÿ secured extra ration coupons (as measly as each one was worth depending on existing supplies), coal, and the attentive ear of local authorities on Stein’s behalf. 19. See Steward, Dear Sammy, 46–51. 20. Stein, Wars, 12. 21. Stein, Wars, 25.

184

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22. This Cézanne was one out of the two portraits that Stein smuggled out of Paris during the Second World War. The other was Picasso’s famous portrait of her. 23. See Wagner-­Martin, “Favored Strangers,” 235–36. 24. Stein, Wars, 26. 25. Steward, Dear Sammy, 78. 26. Stein, Wars, 119. 27. For more on Stein’s “ingenuity” in redeeming her celebrity privileges, see Sawyer-­Lauçanno, Continual Pilgrimage, 59. 28. See Wagner-­Martin, “Favored Strangers,” 238–39. 29. See Wagner-­Martin, “Favored Strangers,” 239. 30. See Wagner-­Martin, “Favored Strangers,” 251. 31. Stein, Wars, 236. 32. Stein, Wars, 236. 33. Stein, Wars, 234. 34. Stein, Wars, 16. 35. Stein, Autobiography of Toklas, 166. 36. Stein, Autobiography of Toklas, 112. 37. Stein, Autobiography of Toklas, 112. 38. See H. R. Kedward, Occupied France: Collaboration and Resistance, 1940– 1944 (Oxford: Blackwell, 1992); H. R. Kedward, Resistance in Vichy France: A Study of Ideas and Motivation in the South­ern Zone, 1940–1942 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1978); H. R. Kedward, In Search of the Maquis: Rural Resistance in South­ern France, 1942–1944 (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1993); Michael Scriven and Peter Wagstaff, eds., War and Society in Twentieth-­Century France (New York: Berg, 1991); Roy Jenkins, Churchill (Lon­don: Macmillan, 2001); Geoffrey Best, Churchill: A Study in Greatness (Lon­don: Hambledon and Lon­don, 2001); Dana Cairns Watson, Gertrude Stein and the Essence of What Happens (Nashville: Vanderbilt University Press, 2005), 149–92; Alan S. Milward, The New Order and the French Economy (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1970); Elizabeth M. Collingham, The Taste of War: World War Two and the Battle for Food (Lon­don: Allan Lane, 2011); Charles Williams, Pétain: How the Hero of France Became a Convicted Traitor and Changed the Course of History (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2005); Kenneth Mouré, “Food Rationing and the Black Market in France (1940–1944),” French History 24, no. 2 (2010): 262–82; Pierre Barral, “Agriculture and Food Supply in France during the Second World War,” in Agri­ culture and Food Supply in the Second World War, ed. Bernd Martin and Alan S. Milward (Ostfildern: Scripta Mercaturae Verlag, 1985), 89–102. 39. Qtd. in Kedward, Resistance, 186. 40. See Kedward, Resistance, 168. 41. Such qualifications regarding Pétain’s his­tori­cal moment and ambiguous legacy have long circulated among historians and Stein scholars. Nearly two decades ago, both John Whittier-­Ferguson and Jean Gallagher took pains to contextualize Stein’s Pétainist sympathies against France’s po­liti­cally turbulent WWII years; see John Whittier-­Ferguson, “Stein in Time: History, Manuscripts, and Memory,”



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185

Modernism/­modernity 6, no. 1 (1999): 115–51; Jean Gallagher, The World Wars through the Female Gaze (Carbondale: South­ern Illinois University Press, 1998). For more recent reiterations of their efforts, see Phoebe Stein, “History, Narrative, and ‘Daily Living’ in Wars I Have Seen,” in Primary Stein: Returning to the Writing of Gertrude Stein, ed. Janet Boyd and Sharon J. Kirsch (Lanham, MD: Lexington Books, 2014), 235–57; Kristin Bergen, “‘Dogs Bark’: War, Narrative, and His­tori­cal Syncopation in Gertrude Stein’s Late Work,” Criticism 57, no. 4 (2015): 609–29. 42. Stein, Wars, 82. 43. Stein, Wars, 92–93. 44. See Stein, Wars, 174. 45. Stein, Wars, 81. 46. Stein, Wars, 82. 47. Burns and Dydo, Letters, 413. 48. February 23, 1946; Burns and Dydo, Letters, 414. 49. Malcolm, Two Lives, 103. 50. Stein, Wars, 74–75. 51. Steward, Dear Sammy, 72. 52. Malcolm, Two Lives, 106. 53. Malcolm, Two Lives, 106. 54. A book introduced to her by vari­ous GIs she meets upon France’s liberation; see Stein, Wars, 256. 55. Stein, Wars, 227. 56. Stein, Wars, 227. 57. Stein, Wars, 228. 58. Stein, Wars, 164. 59. Stein, Wars, 207. 60. See Burns and Dydo, Letters, xx–xxii. 61. The sec­ond and final opera that Stein and Thomson prepared together, The Mother of Us All, came to fruition much easier thanks to Stein having mellowed from her WWII experiences and Thomson’s upgraded business savvy. The opera to which Stein dedicated the last two years of her life came out the year after her death. For more information regarding Stein’s creative endeavors with Thomson, see Susan Holbrook and Thomas Dilworth, eds., The Letters of Gertrude Stein and Virgil Thomson: Composition as Conversation (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2010), 192–220; Dydo, Gertrude Stein, 165–211. 62. Lansing Warren, “Gertrude Stein Views Life and Politics,” New York Times, May 6, 1934, http://movies2.nytimes.com/books/98/05/03/specials/stein-­views.html. 63. Warren, “Gertrude Stein.” 64. Qtd. in Gilbert A. Harrison, ed., Gertrude Stein’s America (Wash­ing­ton, DC: Robert B. Luce, 1965), 42–43. 65. For more on how the New York Times and Life articles have been taken out of context by Stein’s detractors, see Burns and Dydo, Letters, 401–21; Charles Bern­ stein, ed., Gertrude Stein’s War Years: Setting the Record Straight, Jacket2, May 9,

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2012, https://jacket2.org/feature/gertrude-­steins-­war-­years-­setting-­record-­straight; Steven Gould Axelrod, “Mrs. Reynolds: Stein’s Anti-­Nazi Novel,” in Primary Stein: Returning to the Writing of Gertrude Stein, ed. Janet Boyd and Sharon J. Kirsch (Lanham, MD: Lexington Books, 2014), 259–76; Wagner-­Martin, “Favored Strangers,” 223–26; Stein, “History, Narrative.” 66. Wagner-­Martin, “Favored Strangers,” 234. 67. Eric Sevareid, Not So Wild a Dream (Columbia: University of Missouri Press, 1976), 460–61. 68. Sevareid, Not So Wild, 89. 69. Sevareid, Not So Wild, 90. 70. Sevareid, Not So Wild, 457–58. 71. Sevareid, Not So Wild, 458–59. A radio speech that Stein directs to an Ameri­ can audience from Voiron is similarly telling: “It was a wonderful time it was long and it was heartbreaking but every day made it longer and shorter and now thanks to the land of my birth and the land of my adoption we are free, long live France, long live America, long live the United Nations and above all long live liberty, I can tell you that liberty is the most important thing in the world more important than food and clothes more important than anything on this mortal earth, I who spent four years with the French under the German yoke tell you so. I am so happy to be talking to America today so happy” (qtd. in Sevareid, Not So Wild, 462). 72. Barbara Will, Unlikely Collaboration: Gertrude Stein, Bernard Faÿ, and the ­Vichy Dilemma (New York: Columbia University Press, 2011), 190. 73. Gertrude Stein, Last Operas and Plays, ed. Carl Van Vechten (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1977), 6. 74. Stein, Last Operas, 7. 75. Stein, Last Operas, 7. 76. Stein, Last Operas, 24. 77. Leon Katz, “A Response to ‘Gertrude Stein’s Translations of Speeches by Philippe Petain,’” in Gertrude Stein’s War Years: Setting the Record Straight, ed. Charles Bernstein, Jacket2, May 9, 2012, https://jacket2.org/article/response-­gertrude-­steins -­translations-­speeches-­philippe-­petain. 78. For a survey of Stein’s Jewish ties, see Axelrod, “Mrs. Reynolds”; Wagner-­ Martin, “Favored Strangers”; Retallack, “Introduction”; Wineapple, Sister Brother; Maria Damon, “Gertrude Stein’s Jewishness, Jewish Social Scientists, and the ‘Jewish Question,’” Modern Fiction Studies 42, no. 3 (1996): 489–506; Maria Damon, Postliterary America: From Bagel Shop Jazz to Micropoetries (Iowa City: University of Iowa Press, 2011), 73–86; Mellow, Charmed Circle; Amy Feinstein, “Gertrude Stein, Alice Toklas, and Albert Barnes: Looking like a Jew in The Autobiography of Alice B. Toklas,” Shofar 25, no. 3 (2007): 47–60; Sawyer-­Lauçanno, Continual Pilgrimage, 46– 66; Leon Katz, “Weininger and The Making of Ameri­cans,” Twentieth-­Century Litera­ ture 24, no. 1 (1978): 8–26. 79. Daniel, Gertrude Stein, 179. 80. Stein, Wars, 13.



notes

187

81. Stein, Wars, 16. 82. See Feinstein, “Gertrude Stein,” 52–53; Wagner-­Martin, “Favored Strang­ ers,” 34. 83. See Malcolm, Two Lives, 181–93. 84. See Axelrod, “Mrs. Reynolds,” 275 (endnote 1). 85. See Wagner-­Martin, “Favored Strangers,” 255. 86. Steward, Dear Sammy, 9. 87. Steward, Dear Sammy, 103. 88. Steward, Dear Sammy, 103. In The Autobiography of Alice B. Toklas, Stein’s Toklas-­narrator puzzles over where to baptize their godson “Bumby” Hemingway due to everyone’s areligiosity: “We were all born of different religions and most of us were not practicing any, so it was rather difficult to know in what church the baby could be baptized” (231). 89. Qtd. in Steward, Dear Sammy, 13. To clarify, Stein was attracted to Catholicism, yet in a cafeteria-­style sense. Stein enjoyed picking out certain saints, landscapes (Spain), and prophecies to focus on, especially during pensive moments; see Linda S. Watts, Rapture Untold: Gender, Mysticism, and the ‘Moment of Recogni­ tion’ in Works by Gertrude Stein (New York: Peter Lang, 1996). 90. Qtd. in Wagner-­Martin, “Favored Strangers,” 34. 91. Sawyer-­Lauçanno, Continual Pilgrimage, 54–55. 92. Stein, Wars, 69. 93. Stein, Wars, 250. 94. Stein, Wars, 225. 95. Steward, Dear Sammy, 66. 96. Steward, Dear Sammy, 79. 97. Steward, Dear Sammy, 79. 98. Stein, Wars, 200. 99. Brinnin, Third Rose, 385. 100. Stein, Wars, 105. 101. Stein, Wars, 172–73. 102. Stein, Wars, 173. 103. Steward, Dear Sammy, 37. 104. Stein, Wars, 254–55. 105. Wagner-­Martin, “Favored Strangers,” 184. 106. Stein, Yale Gertrude Stein, 287. 107. Malcolm, Two Lives, 196. 108. Qtd. in Robert M. Crunden, Body & Soul: The Making of Ameri­can Mod­ ernism (New York: Basic, 2000), 305; see Crunden, Body & Soul, 289–310, for more on Hemingway’s volatile relationships with his mentors. 109. This is the same Leon Katz whom Toklas shared innumerable secrets with regarding Stein’s earliest private papers (1902–11); see Malcolm, Two Lives, 137–78. From a Columbia University graduate student, he moved on to become a drama professor at Yale University. Although privy to Toklas’s confidences and given ex-

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clusive publishing rights, he never released his annotated version of Stein’s notebooks. 110. Malcolm, Two Lives, 78. 111. Malcolm, Two Lives, 5–7. 112. Malcolm, Two Lives, 93–94. 113. Renate Stendhal, “Why the Witch-­Hunt against Gertrude Stein?” in Gertrude Stein’s War Years: Setting the Record Straight, ed. Charles Bernstein, Jacket2, May 9, 2012, https://jacket2.org/article/why-­witch-­hunt-­against-­gertrude-­stein. 114. Will, Unlikely Collaboration, 138. 115. Will, Unlikely Collaboration, 118. 116. Will, Unlikely Collaboration, 18. 117. Will, Unlikely Collaboration, 19. 118. Will, Unlikely Collaboration, 192. 119. See Václav Paris, “‘Gertrude Stein’s Translations of Speeches’ by Philippe Petain,” in Gertrude Stein’s War Years: Setting the Record Straight, ed. Charles Bernstein, Jacket2, May 9, 2012, https://jacket2.org/article/gertrude-­steins-­translations -­speeches-­philippe-­petain. 120. Will, Unlikely Collaboration, 144. 121. Will, Unlikely Collaboration, 189. 122. Stein, Gertrude Stein, 734. 123. Stein, Gertrude Stein, 742. 124. Will, Unlikely Collaboration, 103. 125. Stein, Last Operas, 15. 126. Will, Unlikely Collaboration, 205. 127. Will, Unlikely Collaboration, 143. 128. Liesl M. Olson, “Gertrude Stein, William James, and Habit in the Shadow of War,” Twentieth-­Century Literature 49, no. 3 (2003): 330. 129. Will, Unlikely Collaboration, 105. 130. Stein, Wars, 65–66. 131. Stein, Wars, 115.

Chapter 5

1. First Manifesto; see Breton, Manifestos, 15 (footnote). 2. Stein, Autobiography of Toklas, 203. 3. Stein, Autobiography of Toklas, 203. 4. Stein, Wars, 15. 5. Stein, Paris France, 38. 6. Stein, Wars, 201. 7. Stein, Wars, 44. 8. Stein, Wars, 161. 9. Stein, Wars, 11. 10. Stein, Wars, 51. 11. Stein, Wars, 52.



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12. Stein, Wars, 47. 13. Stein, Wars, 47. 14. Stein, Wars, 173. 15. See Primo Levi, Survival in Auschwitz, trans. Stuart Woolf (New York: Simon & Schuster, 1996), 32. 16. Stein, Wars, 55. 17. Stein, Wars, 162. 18. Stein, Wars, 47. 19. As a number of recent books attest—Kimberley Reynolds’s Radical Children’s Literature: Future Visions and Aesthetic Transformations in Juvenile Fiction (2007), Marilynn Strasser Olson’s Children’s Culture and the Avant-­Garde: Painting in Paris, 1890–1915 (2013), Sara Pankenier Weld’s Voiceless Vanguard: The Infantilist Aes­ thetic of the Russian Avant-­Garde (2014), and Elina Druker and Bettina Kümmerling-­ Meibauer’s anthology Children’s Literature and the Avant-­Garde (2015)—Stein joined several avant-­garde contemporaries who were interested in writing for children or experimenting with their register. Joan Miró illustrated Lise Deharme’s children’s book There Was a Little Magpie (1928), while Claude Cahun did the same for ­Deharme’s The Woodpecker’s Heart (1937). Desnos himself composed sev­eral poems for Deharme’s children, Tristan and Hyacinthe, in 1932: “The Rose with a Soprano Voice,” “The Delicate Cactus,” “The Tree Who Drinks Wine,” “The Bird from Colorado,” and “The Mustachioed Spider.” His last poetry books include the child-­geared Storysongs (1943) and Flowersongs (1945). As a final note, Woolf’s Nurse Lugton’s Golden Thimble (1923–24) and Joyce’s The Cat and the Devil (1936) both reveal new sides to authors that are typically identified with highbrow adult literature. 20. Stein, Wars, 215. 21. In Time and West­ern Man (1927), Wyndham Lewis views Stein’s childlike language as an imbecilic mannerism, while Breton characterizes Stein’s rose mantra as boringly “childish” in his Second Manifesto (Breton, Manifestos, 141). 22. See Steward, Dear Sammy, 65. 23. Stein, Mrs. Reynolds, 222. 24. Stein, Paris France, 80. 25. Stein, Paris France, 72. 26. Stein, Wars, 63–64. 27. Stein, Gertrude Stein, 368. 28. Stein, Gertrude Stein, 466. 29. Stein, Gertrude Stein, 385. 30. Stein, Gertrude Stein, 377. 31. Stein, Gertrude Stein, 378. 32. Stein, Wars, 171–72. 33. Stein, Wars, 159–60. 34. Stein, Wars, 201. 35. Stein, Ida, 8–9.

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36. Stein, Ida, 35. 37. In “A Diary,” Stein writes, “Ida is very old and very cunning she is dissatisfied with not going. Ida is not very old but very cunning she is satisfied that she is not going” (Stein, Alphabets and Birthdays, 212). 38. See Steward, Chapters, 61; Bennett Cerf, “Trade Winds,” in The Critical Re­ sponse to Gertrude Stein, ed. Kirk Curnutt (Westport, CT: Greenwood Press, 2000), 228. 39. Steward, Dear Sammy, 59. 40. For more on Ida’s intertextual threads, see Bridgman, Gertrude Stein, 305– 10; Dydo, Gertrude Stein, 422–27; Logan Esdale, “Genealogy of Ida A Novel,” in Ida: A Novel, by Gertrude Stein, ed. Logan Esdale (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2012), 144–79; Logan Esdale “Introduction,” in Ida: A Novel, by Gertrude Stein, ed. Logan Esdale (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2012), xi–xxxvi. 41. For details regarding Ida’s compositional timeline, see Stein, Gertrude Stein, 838–41; Steward, Dear Sammy, 59–60, 80. 42. Stein, Ida, 9. 43. Stein, Ida, 102. 44. Stein, Ida, 41. 45. Dana Cairns Watson offers the tidbit that “the fight among the signs probably alludes to the lasting split between two of the most famous modernist sign creators: Stein the ‘cuckoo’ writer and Matisse the painter of goldfish” (136), a theory that is all the more persuasive in light of how Ida introduces a goldfish painter who loses his talent: “He the painter and his painting was dead dead dead” (102). 46. See Steward, Dear Sammy, 20. 47. Stein, Wars, 20. Beyond personal comfort, Stein’s cuckoo references may also be unflattering metaphors for Germany’s troops. “To the French a cuckoo is some one who has stolen somebody else’s nest” (Stein, Wars, 195), so maquisards of­ten greet their German pursuers with the taunt “cuckoo.” 48. Stein, Wars, 107–8. 49. Stein, Wars, 99. 50. See Stein, Ida, 85–86. Never Sleeps also appears in To Do, where he gains a twin brother, Was Asleep. 51. Stein, Ida, 28. 52. This lion may have been inspired by Friedrich Nietzsche’s Thus Spoke Zara­ thustra (1891), a text Stein was well aware of; see Steward, Dear Sammy, 32. In Zarathustra’s opening chapter, “Of the Three Metamorphoses,” the lion is an emblem of secular individualism, while the child, of fresh beginnings; see Friedrich Nietzsche, Thus Spoke Zarathustra (Lon­don: Penguin Classics, 1969), 54–56. That Stein’s lion devours a child, Nietzsche’s icon for what sublimates the lion’s nihilistic energies into a productive optimism, symbolically reinforces Ida’s efforts to unravel all social ties. 53. Stein, Ida, 36. 54. Stein, Ida, 83. 55. Stein, Ida, 25.



notes

191

56. Stein, Ida, 20. 57. Stein, Ida, 4. 58. Stein, Ida, 42. 59. Stein, Ida, 4. 60. Stein, Paris France, 53. 61. Stein, Ida, 48. 62. Stein, Ida, 64. 63. Stein, Ida, 75. 64. Stein, Ida, 94. 65. Stein, Ida, 63. 66. Stein, Paris France, 18. 67. Thornton Wilder, “Introduction to The Geographical History of America,” in Ida: A Novel, by Gertrude Stein, ed. Logan Esdale (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2012), 281. 68. Wilder, “Introduction,” 281. 69. Wilder, “Introduction,” 281. 70. Stein, Ida, 4. 71. Stein, Ida, 6. 72. Stein, Ida, 30. 73. Stein, Ida, 70. 74. Stein, Wars, 17. 75. Stein, Mrs. Reynolds, 41. 76. Stein, Gertrude Stein, 409. 77. Stein, Wars, 134. According to Esdale, Ida’s earliest drafts contained references to the wandering unemployed of America’s Great Depression; see Esdale, “Genealogy,” 175. 78. Stein, Wars, 55. 79. Stein, Wars, 75. 80. Stein, Wars, 157. 81. Stein, Wars, 236. 82. Stein, Ida, 17. 83. See Stein, Ida, 26–27, 52. 84. Stein, Ida, 5. 85. Stein, Ida, 76. 86. Stein, Ida, 49. 87. Stein, Ida, 122. 88. See, again, Lectures in America, “How Writing Is Written,” Two Sisters Who Are Not Sisters, and A Movie. 89. “Portraits and Repetition” (1935), in Stein, Lectures in America, 176. 90. Stein, Wars, 234. Although in the context of situating Stein’s experimental plays within the Dadaist tradition and queer discourse, Sarah Bay-­Cheng likewise compares Stein’s texts with avant-­garde reels in Mama Dada: Gertrude Stein’s Avant-­ Garde Theater (2004). She draws a detailed analogy between Dada’s cinematic tech-

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niques (plotless stories, collage, fragmentation, repetition, duplication, tangents, verbal conceits, disembodied voices) and Stein’s own. See Sarah Bay-­Cheng, Mama Dada: Gertrude Stein’s Avant-­Garde Theater (New York: Routledge, 2004); Abigail Lang, “Stein and Cinematic Identity,” in Gertrude Stein in Europe: Reconfigurations across Media, Disciplines, and Traditions, ed. Sarah Posman and Laura Luise Schultz (Lon­don: Bloomsbury, 2015), 145–63. 91. Charles Chaplin, My Autobiography (New York: Simon & Schuster, 1964), 306. 92. Gertrude Stein, Two Sisters Who Are Not Sisters, trans. Kathleen Douglas, in Ida: A Novel, by Gertrude Stein, ed. Logan Esdale (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2012), 237. 93. Stein, Ida, 15. 94. For more on how The Pearl may have influenced Stein’s last film script, see Lang, “Stein and Cinematic Identity,” 156; Dydo, Gertrude Stein, 278–323. 95. Stein, Autobiography of Toklas, 165. 96. Stein, Ida, 27. 97. Stein, Ida, 25. 98. Stein, Ida, 50. 99. Stein, Ida, 126. 100. Stein, Ida, 106. 101. Stein, Ida, 46. 102. Stein, Ida, 82. 103. Stein, Ida, 53, 55. 104. Stein, Alphabets and Birthdays, vii. 105. Stein, Alphabets and Birthdays, viii. 106. Stein, Alphabets and Birthdays, 26–27. 107. Stein, Alphabets and Birthdays, 80. 108. Stein, Alphabets and Birthdays, 13. 109. Stein, Alphabets and Birthdays, 31. 110. Stein, Alphabets and Birthdays, 42. 111. Stein, Alphabets and Birthdays, 17. 112. See Stein, Alphabets and Birthdays, 23, 25. 113. Stein, Alphabets and Birthdays, 22. 114. Stein, Alphabets and Birthdays, 24. 115. Stein, Alphabets and Birthdays, 67. 116. Stein, Alphabets and Birthdays, xi. 117. Take, for instance, the following lines from Wars I Have Seen: “There was one very funny thing about wars as a child sees it, although there are so many killed there being so many dead is not very real at all” (9), “And children do not take war seriously as war. War is soldiers and soldiers have not to be war but they have to be soldiers” (7). 118. Stein, Wars, 7. 119. Little Helen Button’s name is recycled for the character Lady Helen Button in Ida, one of the heroine’s Bay Shore companions.



notes

193

120. Stein, Paris France, 21–22. 121. Stein, Paris France, 80–81. 122. Stein, Paris France, 83. 123. Stein, Paris France, 84. 124. Stein, Paris France, 85. 125. Stein, Ida, 32. 126. Stein, Wars, 190. 127. Stein, Ida, 108. 128. Stein, Ida, 111. 129. Stein, Ida, 20. 130. Stein, Ida, 33. 131. Stein, Ida, 22. 132. Even as his improvisational reflection on Ida pays homage to its “continuously present” quality, the Canadian poet bpNichol likewise reads the novel as very time-­conscious. Stein’s repetitive variations clock time’s imprint for the reader, despite Ida’s time-­averse rhetoric; see bpNichol, “When the Time Came,” in Gertrude Stein and the Making of Literature, ed. Shirley Neuman and Ira B. Nadel (Boston: Northeast­ern University Press, 1988), 194–209. 133. See Logan Esdale, “Mrs. Simpson,” in Ida: A Novel, by Gertrude Stein, ed. Logan Esdale (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2012), 190. 134. Stein, Everybody’s Autobiography, 102. 135. Stein, Wars, 12. 136. Qtd. in Leick, Gertrude Stein, 193. 137. See Sigmund Freud, “The ‘Uncanny,’” in The Standard Edition of the Com­ plete Psychological Works of Sigmund Freud, Volume XVII (1917–1919): An Infantile Neurosis and Other Works, ed. James Strachey (Lon­don: Hogarth, 2001), 217–56; André Breton, What Is Surrealism? trans. David Gascoyne (Lon­don: Faber & Faber, 1936), 37–43; Breton, Nadja; Hal Foster, Compulsive Beauty (Cambridge: MIT Press, 1993). 138. See Sigmund Freud, “On Narcissism: An Introduction,” in The Standard Edition of the Complete Psychological Works of Sigmund Freud, Vol. XIV (1914–1916): On the History of the Psycho-­Analytic Movement, Papers on Metapsychology and Other Works, ed. James Strachey (Lon­don: Hogarth, 1957), 73–102; Jacques Lacan, Écrits, trans. Bruce Fink (New York: W. W. Norton, 2006), 75–81. 139. Stein, Wars, 113–14. 140. Stein, Wars, 170. 141. Stein, Wars, 41. 142. See Ellen E. Berry, Curved Thought and Textual Wandering: Gertrude Stein’s Postmodernism (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1992), 122. 143. To clarify, Stein experiments with doubles through­out her career. Saints merge and multiply in Four Saints in Three Acts. To Do’s twins Save and Susie have cousins who are triplets, whose cousins are quadruplets, whose cousins are quintuplets, ad infinitum. The twin dogs Never Sleeps and Was Asleep join their ranks,

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along with a twinlike couple, Uno and Una, who tend identical-­seeming children. Moving decades back, nameless “ones” populate Stein’s “Many Many Women.” The point here is, however, that Stein’s doubling motif acquires a sinister edge when linked with paranoia. 144. Unlike Ida’s first half, which was composed over nearly three years (May 1937–early 1940), Stein wrote the novel’s sec­ond half in a matter of two months (April–May 1940); see Esdale, “Genealogy.” 145. Stein, Ida, 6. 146. Stein, Ida, 24. 147. Stein, Ida, 21. 148. Stein, Ida, 21. 149. Stein, Ida, 7. 150. Stein, Ida, 16. 151. See Gertrude Stein, Reflection on the Atomic Bomb, ed. Robert Bartlett Haas (Los Angeles: Black Sparrow, 1974), 94. 152. Stein, How Writing, 45. 153. Stein, How Writing, 45. 154. Stein, How Writing, 43. 155. Even as early as The Making of Ameri­cans, Stein’s twinning device operates through Olga, the younger sister of the Herslands’ first governess, Martha. Nearly twenty years younger than Martha, and “always a little afraid” of her (236), Olga is a bit “queer” like her sister. She is plump, pleasant, attention-­seeking, and attractive to men. But she also bears a “spinster nature” (240–41), Stein writes, “so that she was a ways [sic] being baffling, always making for herself a stupid escaping, sometimes not an easy escaping, sometimes [. . .] escape by accusation” (240). Over three hundred pages later in the Dalkey edition, the author reveals that Olga possesses an alter ego named Ida. “Ida the school-­teacher” appears on page 578, but it takes another ten pages for the reader to realize that she is none other than “Olga who was Ida the sister of the first governess the Herslands had had living with them” (588), a woman to whom Alfred Hersland once wrote a love letter. Olga-­ Ida is “a queer one to mostly every one knowing her,” since “there was not a history in any one’s knowing her” (589). “There is never any history in any man ever knowing her” (591) when no man sticks around long enough to build a life together with her. Yet the absence of long-­term relationships in her romantic history only partially accounts for how Olga-­Ida is “very much a puzzle to very many others” (591). There is something aloof and distracted about Olga’s character. Like Ida’s Ida, Olga-­Ida splits into dual modes: “actively living” and “passively living” (591). This binary bears a rough semblance to Stein’s later nature-­identity/mind-­entity opposition by endowing Olga with pub­lic and private sides. Olga’s “active living” consists of “the nervous sexual asking to be object of all loving” (591), while her “passive living” denotes her “bottom being,” the “stupid resisting, stagnant, dull fairly sensible” self hidden from plain sight (590).



notes

195

156. See Elisabeth Roudinesco, Jacques Lacan, trans. Barbara Bray (New York: Columbia University Press, 1997). 157. See Jacques Lacan, On Paranoid Psychosis in Its Relations with the Person­ ality (Paris: Seuil, 1975); Roudinesco, Jacques Lacan. 158. Behind bars, Christine once cried out that “in an earlier life, my sister was my husband”; qtd. in Christine E. Coffman, Insane Passions: Lesbianism and Psy­ chosis in Literature and Film (Middletown, CT: Wesleyan University Press, 2006), 40. See also Coffman, Insane Passions, 30–65; Jacques Lacan, “Motives of Paranoiac Crime: The Crime of the Papin Sisters,” trans. Jon Anderson, Critical Texts 5, no. 3 (1988): 7–11. 159. Stein, Ida, 50. 160. Stein, Ida, 25. 161. Stein, Ida, 32. 162. Gertrude Stein, Narration (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2010), 56. 163. Stein, Primer, 30. 164. Lundell, “Radio Interview,” 34. 165. Lundell, “Radio Interview,” 35. 166. Stein, Ida, 36. 167. Stein, Ida, 36. 168. Stein, Ida, 127. 169. Stein, Ida, 126. 170. Stein, Ida, 77. 171. Stein, Ida, 86. 172. Stein, Ida, 33. 173. Stein, Ida, 33. 174. Stein, Ida, 22.

Chapter 6 1. Stein, Autobiography of Toklas, 219. 2. Stein, Gertrude Stein, 463. 3. Stein, How Writing, 117. 4. Stein, Wars, 124. 5. See Jean-­François Lyotard, The Postmodern Condition: A Report on Knowl­ edge (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1984). 6. Stein, Wars, 24. 7. Stein, Mrs. Reynolds, 17. 8. In a letter to Thornton Wilder (De­cem­ber 18, 1940), Stein explicitly admits that Angel Harper and Joseph Lane are aliases for Hitler and Stalin: “I am on a new novel now, Mrs. Reynolds it is called, Ida you know is to be published in Janu­ary, and now I wonder is this Mrs. Reynolds more a novel than Ida. Sometimes I dream that I have found a way to write a novel and sometimes I dream that I only dream it, but I like novels bad novels, poor novels, detective novels, senti-

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mental novels, these days I read all the wishy washy novels of the end of the last and the beginning of this century and I long oh how I long to write my novel like that but will I, well anyway Mrs. Reynolds is such a heroine even if it is all about Hitler and Stalin” (Burns, Letters, 276–77). 9. Stein, Mrs. Reynolds, 266. 10. Stein, Mrs. Reynolds, 267. 11. Stein, Mrs. Reynolds, 267. 12. For details regarding Wars I Have Seen’s compositional timeline, see Janet Malcolm, “Gertrude Stein’s War: The Years in Occupied France,” New Yorker, June 2, 2003. 13. Stein, Mrs. Reynolds, 76. 14. Stein, Mrs. Reynolds, 113. 15. Stein, Mrs. Reynolds, 245. 16. Stein, Mrs. Reynolds, 177. 17. Stein, Mrs. Reynolds, 189. 18. Stein, Mrs. Reynolds, 206. 19. Stein, Mrs. Reynolds, 133. 20. Stein, Mrs. Reynolds, 266. 21. Stein, Mrs. Reynolds, 14. 22. Stein, Mrs. Reynolds, 18. 23. Stein, Mrs. Reynolds, 24. 24. Stein, Mrs. Reynolds, 27. 25. Stein, Mrs. Reynolds, 53. 26. Stein, Mrs. Reynolds, 153. 27. Stein, Mrs. Reynolds, 153. 28. Stein, Mrs. Reynolds, 55. 29. Stein, Mrs. Reynolds, 64. 30. Stein, Mrs. Reynolds, 44. 31. Stein, Mrs. Reynolds, 3. 32. Stein, Mrs. Reynolds, 154. 33. Stein, Mrs. Reynolds, 91. 34. Stein, Mrs. Reynolds, 1. 35. Stein, Mrs. Reynolds, 91. 36. Stein, Mrs. Reynolds, 32. 37. Stein, Mrs. Reynolds, 242. 38. Stein, Mrs. Reynolds, 60. 39. Stein, Mrs. Reynolds, 141–42. 40. Stein, Mrs. Reynolds, 240. 41. A euphemism for dying by Nazi hands, the novel’s drowning motif may also have been indebted to stories of civilians accidentally drowning in Mallorca during the First World War; see Stein, Autobiography of Toklas, 180. 42. Stein, Mrs. Reynolds, 144. 43. Stein, Mrs. Reynolds, 145.



notes

197

44. Stein, Mrs. Reynolds, 53. 45. Ironically, Hope and her husband introduce Angel Harper and Joseph Lane to the Reynoldses. When Hope, something of a clairvoyant herself, later dreams that Angel desires to drown a nameless collective, she remembers herself telling him, “You have invented so much invent a way to disappear that is to say to die” (17). By the novel’s end, he obliges her. 46. Stein, Mrs. Reynolds, 76. 47. Stein, Mrs. Reynolds, 40. 48. Stein, Mrs. Reynolds, 40. 49. Stein, Mrs. Reynolds, 84. 50. Stein, Mrs. Reynolds, 205–6. 51. Stein, Mrs. Reynolds, 93. 52. Stein, Mrs. Reynolds, 130. 53. Stein, Mrs. Reynolds, 92. 54. Stein, Mrs. Reynolds, 24. 55. Stein, Mrs. Reynolds, 19. 56. Stein, Mrs. Reynolds, 89. 57. Stein, Mrs. Reynolds, 264. 58. Stein, Mrs. Reynolds, 137. 59. Gertrude Stein, As Fine as Melanctha (New York: Books for Libraries Press, 1969), 107. 60. Stein, Mrs. Reynolds, 45. 61. Part I is the only section subdivided into two chapters. 62. Stein, Mrs. Reynolds, 149. 63. Stein, Mrs. Reynolds, 111, 112. 64. Stein, Mrs. Reynolds, 117–18. 65. Stein, Mrs. Reynolds, 126. 66. Stein, Mrs. Reynolds, 128. 67. For this anecdote, see Stein, Wars, 190. 68. See Watts, Rapture Untold, 26. 69. Stein, Mrs. Reynolds, 213. 70. Stein, Mrs. Reynolds, 213. 71. Stein, Alphabets and Birthdays, 32. 72. Stein, Wars, 9. 73. Stein, Matisse, 126. 74. Stein, Wars, 122. 75. Stein, Wars, 187. 76. Stein, Wars, 206. 77. Stein, Wars, 156. 78. Stein, Wars, 5. 79. Stein, Wars, 146. 80. Stein, Wars, 150. 81. Stein, Wars, 154.

198

notes

82. Stein, Wars, 158. 83. Stein, Wars, 165. 84. Stein, Wars, 166. 85. Stein, Wars, 176. 86. Stein, Wars, 183. 87. Stein, Wars, 244. 88. Stein, Wars, 204. 89. Stein, Wars, 244. 90. Stein, Alphabets and Birthdays, 216. 91. Stein, Alphabets and Birthdays, 216. 92. Stein, Alphabets and Birthdays, 218. 93. Thirteen may have been eliminated for being an unlucky number; see Gertrude Stein, To Do: A Book of Alphabets and Birthdays, in Alphabets and Birth­ days (New York: Books for Libraries Press, 1969), 30. 94. Stein, Alphabets and Birthdays, 225. 95. Stein, Alphabets and Birthdays, 249. 96. “Mildred” presumably alludes to Stein’s friend Mildred Aldrich, the Ameri­ can journalist who witnessed WWI battles from her home atop the Marne hills. 97. Stein, Alphabets and Birthdays, 232. 98. Stein, Alphabets and Birthdays, 236. 99. Stein, Alphabets and Birthdays, 236. 100. Stein, Alphabets and Birthdays, 234. 101. Stein, Alphabets and Birthdays, 234. 102. Stein, Alphabets and Birthdays, 234. 103. Stein, Alphabets and Birthdays, 178. 104. Stein, Alphabets and Birthdays, 178. 105. Stein, Autobiography of Toklas, 190. 106. The closest this memoir gets to hinting at the anti-­Semitic crisis that would boil over in Stein’s adopted homeland fifteen years or so ahead is when the couple need to present their documents aboard a ship destined for England: “This was the spring of twenty-­six and England was still very strict about passports. We had ours alright but Gertrude Stein hates to answer questions from officials, it always worries her” (252). For this Stein, Mrs. Reynolds’s later dream that “nobody had a name” (150) justifies such worries. Given Mrs. Reynolds’s “frightened” response to this namelessness (150), her dream points, not toward the relief of shrugging off constraining labels, but rather to the constraint of being reduced to a number in a line going nowhere. 107. Maria Diedrich, “‘A Book in Translation about Eggs and Butter’: Gertrude Stein’s World War II,” in Women and War: The Changing Status of Ameri­can Women from the 1930s to the 1950s, ed. Maria Diedrich and Dorothea Fischer-­Hornung (New York: Berg, 1990), 105. 108. Diedrich, “Book in Translation,” 98. 109. Diedrich, “Book in Translation,” 105.



notes

199

110. Diedrich, “Book in Translation,” 101. 111. Berry, Curved Thought, 112. 112. Stein, Everybody’s Autobiography, 137. 113. Berry, Curved Thought, 110. 114. Berry, Curved Thought, 111. 115. Berry, Curved Thought, 112. 116. Berry, Curved Thought, 112. 117. Berry, Curved Thought, 126. 118. Berry, Curved Thought, 131. 119. Kelley Wagers, “Gertrude Stein’s ‘His­tori­cal’ Living,” Journal of Modern Lit­ erature 31, no. 3 (2008): 23. 120. Axelrod, “Mrs. Reynolds,” 272. 121. Axelrod, “Mrs. Reynolds,” 272. 122. Axelrod, “Mrs. Reynolds,” 273. 123. Burns and Dydo, Letters, 402. 124. Stein, Wars, 68. 125. Stein, Wars, 60. 126. Stein, Mrs. Reynolds, 19. 127. Stein, Mrs. Reynolds, 12. 128. Stein, Mrs. Reynolds, 18. 129. Stein, Mrs. Reynolds, 266. 130. Whittier-­Ferguson, “Stein in Time,” 125. 131. Whittier-­Ferguson, “Stein in Time,” 124. 132. Whittier-­Ferguson, “Stein in Time,” 124. 133. Whittier-­Ferguson, “Stein in Time,” 146. 134. His recent book Mortality and Form in Late Modernist Literature (2014) preserves this article in more or less its origi­nal form. 135. John Whittier-­Ferguson, “The Liberation of Gertrude Stein: War and Writing,” Modernism/modernity 8, no. 3 (2011): 410. 136. Whittier-­Ferguson, “Stein in Time,” 129. 137. Whittier-­Ferguson, “Stein in Time,” 132. 138. Stein, Gertrude Stein, 361. 139. Stein, “History, Narrative,” 245. 140. Stein, Mrs. Reynolds, 26. 141. Stein, Mrs. Reynolds, 26. 142. Stein, Mrs. Reynolds, 51. 143. Stein, Mrs. Reynolds, 74. 144. Stein, Mrs. Reynolds, 47. 145. Stein, Mrs. Reynolds, 48. 146. Stein, Mrs. Reynolds, 68. 147. Stein, Mrs. Reynolds, 238. 148. Stein, Mrs. Reynolds, 76. 149. Stein, Mrs. Reynolds, 55.

200

notes

150. Stein, Mrs. Reynolds, 239. 151. Stein, Mrs. Reynolds, 76. 152. Stein, Mrs. Reynolds, 65. 153. Stein, Mrs. Reynolds, 29. 154. Stein, Mrs. Reynolds, 74. 155. Stein, Mrs. Reynolds, 141. 156. Stein, Mrs. Reynolds, 25. 157. Stein, Mrs. Reynolds, 249. 158. Stein, Mrs. Reynolds, 71. 159. Stein, Mrs. Reynolds, 165. 160. Stein, Mrs. Reynolds, 183. 161. Stein, Mrs. Reynolds, 29. 162. Stein, Mrs. Reynolds, 133. 163. Stein, Mrs. Reynolds, 25. 164. Stein, Mrs. Reynolds, 26. 165. Stein, Mrs. Reynolds, 116. 166. Stein, Mrs. Reynolds, 261. 167. Stein, Mrs. Reynolds, 64. 168. Stein, Mrs. Reynolds, 141. 169. Stein, Mrs. Reynolds, 231. 170. Stein, Mrs. Reynolds, 231. 171. Stein, Mrs. Reynolds, 75. 172. Stein, Mrs. Reynolds, 135. 173. Stein, Mrs. Reynolds, 135. 174. “Citizen Sade” represented the now-­defunct Section des Piques. See Neil Schaeffer, The Marquis de Sade: A Life (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1999); Maurice Lever, Sade: A Biography, trans. Arthur Goldhammer (New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 1993). 175. See Brandon, Surreal Lives, 206–07.

Afterword 1. See Raymond Queneau, Letters, Numbers, Forms: Essays, 1928–70, trans. Jordan Stump (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 2007), 101–32; Albert Camus, The Rebel: An Essay on Man in Revolt (New York: Vintage, 1991); Roger Shattuck, Forbidden Knowledge: From Prometheus to Pornography (San Diego: Harvest, 1996), 226–301; Michael Richardson, “The Marquis de Sade and Revolutionary Violence,” in Surrealism: Key Concepts, ed. Krzysztof Fijalkowski and Michael Richardson (Lon­ don: Routledge, 2016), 71–80; Laurence L. Bongie, Sade: A Biographical Essay (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1998). 2. Marquis de Sade, Oeuvres completes du marquis de Sade, Vol. XII (Paris: ­Cercle du Livre Précieux, 1966–67), 276. 3. Aristotle. Poetics, trans. Malcolm Heath (Lon­don: Penguin, 1996), 53b.



notes

201

4. See Schaeffer, Marquis, 25–35. 5. See Bruce Goldman, “Brain Zap Saps Destructive Urges,” Stanford Medicine News Center, De­cem­ber 18, 2017, https://med.stanford.edu/news/all-­news/2017/12 /brain-­zap-­saps-­destructive-­urges.html. 6. Breton, Manifestos, 18, emphasis origi­nal. 7. Breton, Manifestos, 5. 8. Breton, Manifestos, 44. 9. Breton, Manifestos, 44. 10. Breton, Manifestos, 44. 11. Breton, Manifestos, 47, emphasis origi­nal. 12. Breton, Manifestos, 187. 13. Breton, Manifestos, 125. 14. Breton, Manifestos, 126. 15. Breton, Manifestos, 128, emphasis origi­nal. 16. Stein, Gertrude Stein, 448. 17. Stein, Gertrude Stein, 448. 18. Stein, Gertrude Stein, 450. 19. Stein, Gertrude Stein, 454. 20. Stein, Gertrude Stein, 454. 21. For a survey of childhood representations through­out West­ern literary history, see Adrienne E. Gavin, ed., The Child in British Literature: Literary Construc­tions of Childhood, Medieval to Contemporary (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2012); Charles Lock, ed., Cultures of Childhood: Literary and His­tori­cal Studies in Memory of Julia Briggs (Copenhagen: Museum Tusculanum Press, 2008); Roni Natov, The ­Poetics of Childhood (New York: Routledge, 2003); Robert Pattison, The Child Fig­ure in English Literature (Athens: University of Georgia Press, 1978); Kimberley Reynolds, Children’s Literature: From the Fin de Siècle to the New Millennium (Devon: Northcote, 2012); Elisabeth Wesseling, ed., The Child Savage, 1890–2010: From Comics to Games (Surrey: Ashgate, 2016). 22. David Hopkins, “Re-­enchantment: Surrealist Discourses of Childhood, Hermeticism, and the Outmoded,” in A Companion to Dada and Surrealism, ed. David Hopkins (Hoboken, NJ: John Wiley & Sons, 2016), 271. 23. Breton, Manifestos, 3–4. 24. Breton, Manifestos, 39–40, emphasis origi­nal. 25. Breton, Manifestos, 15. 26. Breton, Manifestos, 16. 27. Breton, Manifestos, 16. 28. Breton, Manifestos, 285. 29. Second Manifesto; Breton, Manifestos, 123–24. 30. Stein, Autobiography of Toklas, 266. This saying of hers echoes, interestingly enough, Flaubert’s famous quote “Be regular and orderly in your life like a Bourgeois so that you may be violent and origi­nal in your work”; qtd. in Mason Currey, Daily Rituals: How Artists Work (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 2015), 144.

202



notes

31. Stein, Autobiography of Toklas, 266. 32. Stein, Gertrude Stein, 392, 393. 33. Stein, Gertrude Stein, 393–94. 34. Stein, Gertrude Stein, 395. 35. Stein, Gertrude Stein, 561. 36. Stein, Gertrude Stein, 572.

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Index abstract expressionism, 9, 44, 63–64 Adnams, Marion, 8 Agar, Eileen, 8 Anderson, Sherwood, 83 Anthony, Susan B., 83 Antin, David, 174n10 anti-­Semitism, 72–102, 104, 198n106 Apollinaire, Guillaume, 7, 10–11 Arendt, Hannah, 104 Aristotle, 161 Arp, Hans, 159 Artaud, Antonin, 109, 117, 126 automatism, 3, 29, 45–71, 89. See also phenomenology Axelrod, Steven Gould, 74, 89, ­ 152–53 Baes, Rachel, 8 Barnes, Djuna, 124 Beats, 148 Bellmer, Hans, 104, 118, 158, 164 Bellon, Denise, 8 Benjamin, Walter, 164 Bernstein, Charles, 84 Berry, Ellen E., 148–52, 154 Bilignin, 8, 75, 77, 92, 107, 135 Birmingham, Kevin, 148 Blake, William, 164 Blanchot, Maurice, 149 Blavatsky, Helena, 63 Bongie, Laurence L., 160 Braudel, Fernand, 149 Bravo, Lola Alvarez, 8 Breton, André, 7–8, 17–18, 21–23, 25, 29, 49–50, 62, 103, 106, 109, 118, 125, 129, 133, 135, 156, 158–59, 162–65, 167 Breton, Elisa, 8

Bridgwater, Emmy, 8 Bromfield, Louis, 83 Buñuel, Luis, 117–18, 120–21, 158 Burns, Edward M., 81–82, 96–97 Cahun, Claude, 8, 189n19 Camus, Albert, 160 Carrington, Leonora, 8 celebrity, 66–68, 103, 108–10, 124, 128–31, 139 Cerf, Bennett, 81–82, 126 Certeau, Michel de, 149 Cézanne, Paul, 5, 35–44, 76 Chagall, Marc, 21, 91, 159 Chaplin, Charlie, 116–17 Chekhov, Anton, 150 childhood: ideal, 23, 105–9, 121–24, 133, 160, 164–66, 190n52; literature, 72, 113, 115, 119–21, 139, 189n19, 201n21 Chirico, Giorgio de, 7 Churchill, Winston, 78, 150 Clair, René, 117 Cocteau, Jean, 7, 11 Colquhoun, Ithell, 8 Columbus, Christopher, 114 communism, 23, 74, 79–81, 99–100, 108, 129 Conley, Katharine, 53 Contemporary Jewish Museum, 74 continuous present, 5, 26, 55–60, 95, 145. See also entity; human mind Cooper, James Fenimore, 125 Copland, Aaron, 75 Corbaz, Aloïse, 8 Cornell, Joseph, 164 Crevel, René, 7, 14–18, 28, 50–51, 128, 158, 160, 166–67

216

index

Croix de Feu, 97 cubism, 31–44. See also Picasso, Pablo Dachau, 75 Dadaism, 12, 33, 45–46, 64, 158 Dalí, Salvador, 7, 109–10, 126, 128, 159 Darnand, Joseph, 79 Deharme, Lise, 189n19 DeKoven, Marianne, 3 Delbo, Charlotte, 88 Derrida, Jacques, 148 Desnos, Robert, 21–23, 51–53, 65, 118, 159, 189n19 detective fiction, 68, 105, 127–29 Diedrich, Maria, 148–49, 152 Dominguez, Oscar, 158 Dostoevsky, Fyodor, 150 Dreyfus affair, 73, 80, 104. See also anti-­Semitism Duchamp, Marcel, 7, 9–10, 13, 51– 52, 63, 159, 164. See also Sélavy, Rrose Duflos, Huguette, 128 duplication, 108–11, 116–18, 124–32, 137–38, 193–94n143, 194n155 Dydo, Ulla E., 81–84, 96–97 early repetitive mode, 1, 46, 55–59, 140–41, 169n1 Eco, Umberto, 71 écriture feminine, 149 Edward VIII, 124, 128, 131 Eichmann, Adolf, 104 Eliot, George, 150 Éluard, Nusch, 8 entity, 5–6, 65–71, 103, 107–8, 113– 15, 123–24, 126–32, 163–64, 194n155. See also continuous present; duplication; human mind; human nature; identity Ernst, Max, 7, 159, 164 Exandier, Josette, 8

fairy tale, 24, 53, 111, 119 Faÿ, Bernard, 2, 73–75, 77, 83, 88, ­97–101 film, 1, 5, 80, 93, 109, 116–18, 125, 137 Fini, Leonor, 8 Flanner, Janet, 76 Flaubert, Gustave, 150, 201n30 Foucault, Michel, 148–49 Frank, Anne, 88 Freemasons, 73–74, 80 Freudianism, 3, 7, 23, 25, 29, 74, 105–6, 111–13, 125, 128–29, 138– 39, 159, 162, 164 Franco, Francisco, 75, 97 futurism, 9–10, 12 Gadamer, Hans-­Georg, 40 Gallup, Donald C., 121, 132 Gass, William H., 55 Gaulle, Charles de, 80 Gautier, Théophile, 150 Goncourt, Edmond and Jules de, 5, 36–37, 39. See also impressionism; Ruskin, John; Shklovsky, Viktor Göring, Hermann, 79 Graverol, Jane, 8 Greenhouse, Emily, 1–2, 74 Haas, Robert Bartlett, 43, 120, 127, 152 harpy, 129, 135, 156 Harvard University, 68–70 Hejinian, Lyn, 38–39 Hemingway, Ernest, 16–17, 95, 123, 130–31, 187n88 Henriot, Philippe, 82–83 history, 25, 55, 95–96, 133–59 Hitler, Adolf, 2, 53, 72–73, 78–80, 84– 86, 90, 94, 97–98, 101, 103, 110, 113, 133–57, 160 Hobbes, Thomas, 162, 164 Holocaust, 72, 75–77, 97, 101–2, 134, 138–39, 143



index

Homer, 109, 151 Hugnet, Georges, 2–3, 7, 12–13, 47– 49, 83–84, 116–17 Hugo, Valentine, 8 human mind, 5–6, 65–71, 103, 107–8, 113–15, 123–24, 126–32, 163–64, 194n155. See also continuous present; duplication; entity; human nature; identity human nature, 65, 67–68, 107–8, 126–32, 144, 146–47, 163–64, 180n105, 194n155. See also duplication; entity; human mind; identity Husserl, Edmund, 69–71, 181n120 identity, 65, 67–68, 107–8, 126–32, 144, 146–47, 163–64, 180n105, 194n155. See also duplication; entity; human mind; human nature Imbs, Bravig, 7, 11–12 impressionism, 36–37, 39, 43–44 improvisational writing, 62–66. See also continuous present; entity; human mind; Spolin, Viola; theater Isherwood, Christopher, 30 Jacob, Max, 89 James, Henry, 150 James, William, 3, 68–69, 100, 107, 142, 181n120 Jarry, Alfred, 7 Jeffersonianism, 74, 98, 101 Johns Hopkins University, 60–64 Joyce, James, 33, 68, 189n19 Judaism, 75, 88–96 Kafka, Franz, 97, 158 Kahlo, Frida, 8 Kandinsky, Wassily, 44, 64 Katz, Leon, 88, 90, 96, 187–88n109 Kerouac, Jack, 63

217

Lacan, Jacques, 125–26, 128–29 language, 33, 38, 40, 130 Language poets, 148 Lautréamont, Comte de, 7, 19 Laval, Pierre, 86 Le Corbusier, 7 Lee, Chang-­Rae, 150 Leibermann, Max, 38–39 lesbianism, 16–17, 21, 73, 97, 120, 170n16 Levi, Primo, 72, 88, 104 Lewis, Lloyd, 83 Lipchitz, Jacques, 133 Locke, John, 162 Lundeberg, Helen, 8 Lyotard, Jean-­François, 134 Maar, Dora, 8 Malcolm, Janet, 2, 89–90, 96–97, 100, 106 maquis, 77, 79, 82–83, 88, 100, 134, 143 Marinetti, F. T., 10, 150 Martins, Maria, 8 Massot, Pierre de, 7 Medková, Emilia, 8 Metropolitan Museum of Art, 2, ­74–75 Meyer, Steven, 142 milice, 79, 98, 143 Miller, Lee, 8 mimesis, 29–44. See also photography; visual art Miró, Joan, 7, 159, 189n19 modernism, 32, 52, 64, 113–14, 140, 155, 161, 189n19 Monnier, Adrienne, 128 Morrison, Toni, 150 Mossé, Sonia, 8 Museum of Modern Art (San Francisco), 74 Mussolini, Benito, 82

218

index

Narrative Historicism, 148 New Historicism, 148 Nietzsche, Friedrich, 162, 190n52 Nouveau, Germain, 7 Obama administration, 75 Odile of Alsace, Saint, 135, 142, 151, 153, 156 Olivier, Fernande, 136 Oliviero, Yolande, 8 Olson, Liesl M., 100 omens, 25, 111, 131, 142 Oppenheim, Meret, 8 Pailthorpe, Grace, 8 Pantaine, Marguerite, 128–29 Papin, Christine and Léa, 125, 128–29 Parent, Mimi, 8 Penrose, Valentine, 8 Péret, Benjamin, 159 Perloff, Marjorie, 69, 174n10 Perpignan, 76 Pétain, Marshal, 2, 73, 78–84, 87–88, 97–101 phenomenology, 29–44, 181n120. See also automatism; Shklovsky, Viktor; visual art photography, 30, 39–40, 60, 104 Picabia, Francis, 7, 9–10, 12, 116–17 Picasso, Pablo, 5, 7, 31–44, 114, 150– 51. See also cubism Plato, 161 Pollock, Jackson, 63–64 Pomerantz, Charlotte, 113, 119 postimpressionism, 35–44 poststructuralism, 147–55 Pound, Ezra, 10 Pyle, Ernie, 82 Queneau, Raymond, 160 rap, 54–55, 63. See also sound play Ray, Man, 7, 11, 30, 91, 116, 118, 158–59

realism, 34, 104–5, 147–55 republicanism (American), 75 Rice, William, 81–82, 96–97 Richardson, Michael, 160 Rimbaud, Arthur, 7 Rimmington, Edith, 8 romanticism, 164 Rönnebeck, Arnold, 78 Roosevelt, Franklin D., 75, 99 Rose, Francis, 7, 13–14 Rousseau, Jean-­Jacques, 162 Roussel, Raymond, 7 rue Christine, 75, 86 Rumi, 70–71 Ruskin, John, 5, 36, 41, 43. See also Goncourt, Edmond and Jules de; impressionism; Shklovsky, Viktor Sade, Marquis de: libertine motifs, 21–23, 52, 118, 128, 157–59, 163– 64; life, 7, 158, 160–62 Sage, Kay, 8 Saint-­Exupéry, Antoine de, 119, 155 Salmon, André, 19–20 Salomon, Charlotte, 102 Santayana, George, 68–70, 181nn120–21 Sélavy, Rrose, 13, 51–52 Service du Travail Obligatoire, 79 Sesame Street, 120 Sevareid, Eric, 85–87 Shattuck, Roger, 160 Sherman, Cindy, 8 Shklovsky, Viktor, 4. See also Goncourt, Edmond and Jules de; phenomenology; Ruskin, John Simpson, Wallis, 109–10, 113, 124, 128, 131, 136 Skinner, B. F., 63–65 Slinger, Penny, 8 Smith, Hélène, 8 solipsism, 103–32, 133–35, 155–57



index

Solomons, Leon M., 61–62 Sontag, Susan, 30 sound play, 30, 52, 54–55, 112–13, 119, 139-­40. See also rap Soupault, Philippe, 49–50, 117 Spolin, Viola, 63, 65–66. See also improvisational writing; theater Stalin, Joseph, 135–36, 155, 157 Stein, Leo, 105, 128 Stein, Michael, 7, 89 Stein, Phoebe, 74, 154–55 Steins Collect, The, 2, 74–75 Stevenson, Robert Louis, 126 Steward, Samuel, 2, 8, 13, 60, 77, 89– 90, 92–93, 105, 111 surrealism: female practitioners, 8; principles, 9, 11, 15, 17–27, 29–30, 45–53, 60, 62–63, 72, 103–5, 109– 14, 116–19, 121, 126, 128, 133–35, 156–67, 160–66 Švankmajerová, Eva, 8 Swift, Jonathan, 119 synesthesia, 3, 30 Tanning, Dorothea, 8 Tchelitchew, Pavel, 7, 11, 14 theater: experience of, 60; improvisational, 63, 65–66. See also improvisational writing; Spolin, Viola Thomson, Virgil, 83, 90–91, 185n61 Toklas, Alice B., 11, 13, 16, 19–20, 69, 73, 86, 89–90, 93, 95–97, 139 Toyen, 8 Tzara, Tristan, 7, 12, 23, 45–47, 91 utopia, 23–24, 135, 152, 156, 158

219

Vaché, Jacques, 4, 23, 158 Van Dusen, Wanda, 74 Varo, Remedios, 8 Vichy France, 24–25, 53, 72–109, 113–15, 121–23, 125–26, 136–39, 142–44, 164. See also World War II visual art, 29–44. See also cubism; expressionism (abstract); impressionism; mimesis; phenomenology; photography; postimpressionism Wagers, Kelley, 152 Wagner-­Martin, Linda, 69–70, 85 Walker, Jayne L., 41–43 Weininger, Otto, 89 White, Hayden, 149 Whitehead, Alfred North, 69, 142 Whittier-­Ferguson, John, 106, 152–54 Wiesel, Elie, 88 Wilde, Oscar, 73 Wilder, Thornton, 32, 83, 94, 114, 167 Will, Barbara, 2–4, 74, 96–101 Wittgenstein, Ludwig, 69, 126, 142 Woodman, Francesca, 8 Woolf, Virginia, 33, 59, 68, 189n19 Wordsworth, William, 147, 164 World War I, 37, 77–78, 82, 103, 115, 123, 147, 163, 196n41 World War II, 27, 53, 72–102, 103–9, 113–15, 121–23, 125–26, 133–35, 143–44, 154, 160, 164–65. See also Vichy France Zeid, Princess Fahrelnissa, 8 Zemánková, Anna, 8 Zürn, Unica, 8